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LOVE  AND 
THE  SOUL  MAKER 


LOVE  AND 
THE  SOUL  MAKER 


BY 

MARY  AUSTIN 

AUTHOR  OF  "THE  LAND  OF  LITTLE  RAIN,"  —  /  ?& 
"A  WOMAN  OF  GENIUS,"  ETC.  — 


NEW  YORK  AND   LONDON 

D.   APPLETON    AND    COMPANY 

1914 


COPYRIGHT,  1914,  BY 
D.  APPLETON  AND  COMPANY 


Copyright,  1014,  by  the  McClure  Publications 


Printed  in  the  United  States  of  America 


4 


/  believe  thai  the  ills  of  this  world  are 
remediable  while  we  are  in  the  world  by 
no  other  means  than  the  Spirit  of  Truth 
and  Brotherliness  working  their  lawful 
occasions  among  men.  I  believe  in  Here 

and  Now. 

From  Christ  in  Italy. 


7211 


LOVE   AND  THE  SOUL 
MAKER 

IF  somebody  would  only  write  a  book 
about  it!"  said  Valda  McNath,  "a 
believable  book!" 

We  were  sitting  on  the  steps  in  front  of 
Valda's  bungalow  in  the  clear  obscure  of 
twilight,  watching  the  flat  welter  of  the  wa- 
ter far  out  on  the  Sound,  and  a  blundering 
moth  came  and  stirred  the  sweet  white 
spikes  of  the  phlox.  Valda  had  been  cry- 
ing. 

"The  trouble  with  books  about  it,"  she 
said,  "is  that  they  are  too  scientific,  or  tales 
made  out  to  fit  a  special  case.  It  wants  just 
a  human  book;  true  and  human."  Valda 
sighed.  She  hadn't  found  anything  in  the 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

books  to  fit  the  special  case  she  had  made 
of  her  life,  and  the  chief  reason  why  I 
happened  to  be  sitting  there  at  that  moment 
was  to  see  her  through  the  most  unbearable 
of  its  bitternesses. 

Valda  is  one  of  those  women  with  an  in- 
satiable sort  of  appetite  for  goodness  and  no 
very  clear  notion  of  what  it  consists  in ;  few 
men  understand  what  that  hunger  is  in 
women  .  .  .  like  the  opium-eater's  for  his 
drug.  In  her  youth  she  had  accepted  the 
criterion  of  her  church  and  made  her  mar- 
riage on  a  basis  of  non-smoking,  church-go- 
ing habits  as  a  surface  index  of  godliness, 
with  a  young  man  who  turned  out  to  have 
fallen  into  these  commendable  behaviours 
chiefly  for  the  want  of  spring  and  vitality 
to  become  anything  else.  After  a  dozen 
years  or  so  Valda  had  left  him  somewhere 
at  the  back  of  beyond,  simply  because  she 
couldn't  stand  him,  and  come  up  to  the  city 

2 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

sick  with  the  hunger  of  what  still  shaped  to 
her  mind  as  righteousness.  And  she  was  so 
right,  too ;  so  sincere  in  her  efforts  to  square 
her  life  with  what  might  conceivably  be 
the  purpose  of  the  Powers,  that  she  couldn't 
just  accept  the  leading  of  her  appetites. 
She  had  to  take  her  satisfactions  cribbed 
and  crammed  into  the  frame  of  what  for  the 
time  being,  bore  the  name  of  goodness  on  its 
face.  She  read  the  publications  of  the 
Fabian  Society  and  fell  in  love  with  a  Social 
Reactionist. 

He  was  a  man  with  a  mission  to  encour- 
age the  higher  civic  obligations,  and  wholly 
without  a  sense  of  humour.  He  and  Valda 
made  between  them  a  high  ground  which 
somehow  carried  them  sheer  over  the  heads 
of  Valda's  husband  and  some  ties  of  the 
Reactionist's,  on  which  they  breathed  for 
a  time,  at  least  Valda  breathed,  rarefied, 
heavenly  airs.  But  she  had  no  sooner  estab- 

3 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

lished  herself  there  with  all  her  baggage  of 
passions  and  affections,  and  poor  Valda 
carried  an  excess  of  that  kind  of  baggage, 
when  the  Reactionist  discovered  that  he  had 
made  a  mistake  in  the  quality  of  his  attach- 
ment. What  had  begun  as  a  self-justifying 
passion  had  died  down  to  friendliness  and, 
of  course,  a  really  profound  respect  The 
Reactionist  told  me  himself  how  profound 
it  was.  It  appeared  he  would  have  done 
anything  for  Valda  except  refrain  from 
telling  her — a  little  the  most  dastardly  ad- 
mission a  man  can  make  to  a  woman — that 
he  had  pillaged  her  most  sacred  treasury  in 
the  interest  of  a  cheap,  transient  indulgence. 
If  he  had  involved  Valda's  capital  of  dol- 
lars to  that  extent,  he  wouldn't  have  thought 
of  anything  but  holding  on  to  the  situation 
until  she  could  have  got  out  of  it  with 
credit;  in  the  event  of  a  total  loss  he  would 
probably  have  made  it  up  to  her  without 

4 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

saying  anything.  But  it  never  occurred  to 
him  that  the  same  obligation  held  him  to  an 
investment  of  passions  and  affections.  He 
wasn't  a  bad  man,  he  was  just — mannish. 
What  I  suspected  was  that  Valda's  disposi- 
tion to  sink  the  personal  issue  in  the  interest 
of  the  passion  that  had  sprung  up  between 
them,  charged,  electric,  wonderful,  had 

rather   damped   his   male   propensity   for 



wanting  to  see  himself  always  as  the  mover 

flfr'M 

of  the  game. 

He  would  have  had  their  love  spun  out 
from  his  dextrous  handling,  a  glimmering, 
gossamer  entanglement;  but  it  was  a  child 
to  Valda  that  in  the  intervals  when  they 
were  apart,  nursed  at  her  imagination,  grew 
beyond  recognition.  And  the  Reactionist 
had  retired  before  it  into  a  wobbly  little 
pinnacle  of  a  situation  that,  since  he  no  lon- 
ger loved  Valda,  he  couldn't  do  her  the  dis- 
respect to  pretend  that  he  had  any  obliga- 

5 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

tion  beyond  his  own  susceptibilities ;  and  I 
had  plucked  Valda  away  in  time,  I  hoped, 
to  keep  her  from  seeing  the  pit  of  cold 
egotism  into  which  he  immediately  toppled. 

That  was  how  I  came  to  be  sitting  there 
with  Valda  on  an  evening  shot  through 
with  glimmers  of  the  day's  warm  lights  and 
odours,  talking  about  sex  behaviours. 

"If  there  could  only  be  a  true  book  about 
it!"  she  insisted.  "You  could  write  it.  But 
I  suppose  you'd  be  afraid  of  being  misun- 
derstood." 

All  at  once  I  discovered,  with  the  sense 
of  finding  myself  in  possession  of  a  new  ap- 
titude— like  that  one  in  dreams  in  which 
you  just  tuck  up  your  feet  and  go  sailing 
through  the  air — that  I  wasn't  afraid  even 
of  being  misunderstood.  I  don't  know  if 
it  is  one  of  the  things  that  belongs  with  hav- 
ing turned  forty,  but  I  knew  at  the  moment, 

6 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

quite  completely,  that  I  had  left  it  behind 
me. 

"I  shouldn't,"  I  said.  "I  should  hate  it, 
of  course,  just  as  I  hate  being  poor,  but  I 
shouldn't  be  afraid  of  it.  The  real  fear 
would  be  that  it  wouldn't  be  what  you  said 
at  first,  believable." 

"You  think,"  Valda  questioned,  "that 
people  would  think  you  hadn't  had  experi- 
ence enough ;  or  that  they  would  think  you 
had  too  much?" 

But  it  wasn't  that  either.  Besides,  you 
can't  tell  how  much  experience  a  woman 
has  had,  .  .  .  you  can  only  tell  how  lit- 
tle. .  .  . 

"I  should  be  afraid,"  I  said,  coming  back 
to  Valda,  "that  they  would  think  it  merely 
literary."  I  saw  myself  under  the  unfor- 
tunate disability  of  writing  of  matters  of 
which  no  books  had  been  written,  or  of  not 
being  able  to  quote  the  chapter  and  page 

7 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

of  those  that  had.  An  absence  of  the 
familiar  earmarks  of  citation  is  sometimes 
misleading  as  to  the  quality  of  the  proffered 
information.  It  wouldn't  require  any  cour- 
age on  my  part  to  write  such  a  book,  but  it 
might  require  a  great  deal  to  publish  it  and 
not  have  all  the  fructifying  sources  trailing 
after  it  in  the  shape  of  footnotes,  as  the 
queen  bee  trails  the  entrails  of  her  mate. 

"Ah,  I  don't  mean  an  important  book," 
insisted  Valda,  "not  one  that  would  enable 
people  to  talk  learnedly  about  love,  but 
would  help  us  not  to  make  such  a  muddle  of 
our  loving.  Women  want  such  a  book,  and 
the  men  need  it.  I  know,"  she  added  has- 
tily, "we  get  into  a  way  of  thinking  that,  be- 
cause men  have  easier  access  to  sex  experi- 
ence, they  necessarily  know  more  about  it. 
But  I  tell  you  .  .  .  when  they  come  to  the 
vital  things  about  it  ...  they  just  .  .  . 
grope." 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

"I  am  afraid,"  said  I,  "they've  a  notion  if 
we  had  any  kind  of  sex  rationalism  there 
wouldn't  be  any  fun  in  it.  It's  a  way  some 
people  feel  about  Socialism;  the  Great 
Game  would  be  up  if  we  abated  any  of  our 
privileges  of  getting  everlastingly  worsted 
at  it." 

But  in  the  end  Valda  prevailed  upon  me. 
I've  done  my  best  to  make  it  what  she 
wanted:  a  true  book — and  human. 

Whether  you  find  it  believable  is  another 
matter.  What  I  want  most  for  it  is  that  you 
shouldn't  find  it  any  less  so  because  it  is  in- 
teresting. Even  because  you  are  moved  by 
it.  One  must  have  been  moved  first  in  or- 
der to  establish  the  argument. 

A  scientist,  no  doubt,  in  an  account  of  the 
first  Love  dances,  would  have  left  the  moon 
out  of  the  sky.  That  is  just  the  trouble  with 
scientists.  There  is  always  a  moon,  and  the 
light  of  it  and  the  wind  out  of  the  south 

9 


LOVE    AND   THE    SOUL    MAKER 

with  the  smell  of  wild  honey  in  it  is  the  in- 
calculable factor  of  our  experience. 

Too  many  people  have  got  into  a  way  of 
thinking  that  to  speak  of  sex  experience  is 
to  mean  something  illicit.  It  is  in  fact  the 
most  precious  part  of  our  human  equip- 
ment. I  want  to  say — I  don't  know  why  I 
shouldn't — that  I  have  always  found  it  so ; 
and  I  wish  more  than  anything  else  to  show 
you  how  it  derives  its  importance  in  our 
lives  from  this  quality  of  its  preciousness, 
and  not  from  the  effect  of  disturbing  any 
other  set  of  behaviours  we  may  have  agreed 
upon  as  moral. 

It  is  necessary  that  we  clear  up  the  accu- 
mulation of  misconceptions,  irrespective  of 
the  names  under  which  they  have  been  go- 

r      f.  *•       •—  "*" 

ing  about.  It  is  not  uncommon  to  find 
women  cutting  themselves  off  from  the 
highest  manifestations  of  sex  life  by  de- 
stroying its  root  in  the  interest  of  some  of 
10 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

the  more  spiritualised  aspects,  which  are 
not  recognised  as  sex  at  all. 

It  seemed  worth  while  then  to  draw 
away  from  the  ruck  of  disassociated  be- 
haviours, and  define  the  features  of  our 
common  life  which  take  their  rise  in  the  sex 
propensity  and  are  yet  not  commonly  attrib- 
utable to  it,  and  to  undertake  to  organise  a 
classification,  if  no  more  than  a  Best  and 
Not  Best,  and  to  establish  a  criterion  of 
knowing  when  we  are  getting  it. 

It  is  important  to  remember  in  this  con- 
nection that  it  isn't  necessary,  in  order  to  be 
contributory,  for  a  sex  encounter  to  be  dra- 
matic. It  is  not  so  much  its  range  as  the 
content  and  continuity  with  other  frames 
of  behaviour  that  constitute  its  value. 
There  is  probably  not  much  difference  be- 
tween the  temperament  of  the  courtesan 
and  any  woman  of  wide  sympathies;  it  is 
largely  a  matter  of  taking  one's  sex  contacts 
ii 


LOVE    AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

in  incident  or  understanding;  and  it  is  often 
possible  to  make  more  of  a  small  fixed  in- 
come than  an  irregular  large  one.  It  is 
even  equally  a  sex  experience  not  to  have 


WE  have  to  begin,  then,  with  love 
as  a  matter  of  fact  and  not  alto- 
gether of  opinion,  as  a  force 
immensely  and  variously  operative  in  the 
individual,  but  tracing  a  definite  pattern  on 
the  field  of  human  history.  What  love  has 
been  we  can  reasonably  know;  the  guessing 
begins  when  we  try  to  figure  out  where  it 
means  to  land  us.  Where  it  hasn't  is 
on  the  once  entertained  proposition  that 
love-life  exists  solely  for  and  by  its  re- 
productive values.  It  is  in  fact  a  modern 
notion,  as  modern  as  Christianity,  that  sex 
is  bailed  out  of  the  limbo  of  indecency  by 
being  computed  in  terms  of  children.  What 
I  venture  to  deny — and  make  good  my  claim 

13 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

to  do  so,  if  you  will  face  with  me  and  ac- 
cept at  its  profoundest  the  evidence  of  our 
daily  living — is  that  there  has  never  been 
a  time  since  man  stood  up  and  knew  himself 
for  man,  that  the  major  process  of  love  has 
been  reproductive.  For  the  truth  that  we 
witness  at  every  turn  of  practice,  is  that 
the  test  of  the  value  of  sex  in  life  is  interior. 
It  maintains  itself  by  means  of  its  psychic 
reactions.  Considered  apart  from  its  func- 
tion of  multiplication,  sex  is  an  ascending 
human  phenomenon. 

I  said  ascending:  the  raptures,  indecen- 
cies— not  mere  trailed  and  belittling  sur- 
vival of  brutishness,  but  the  very  increment 
of  progression.  When  we  speak  of  "animal 
passion"  we  mean  nothing  that  any  animal 
can  be  charged  with,  but  an  inordinate  hu- 
man propensity,  since  we  are  not  identified 
with  our  beast  brother,  but  distinguished 
from  him,  by  being  sexed  beyond  the  pri- 
14 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

mary  requirement.  Except  in  domesticity, 
where  they  learn  by  restraint  the  character- 
istic human  vices,  the  dwellers  in  the  lairs, 
the  inhabitants  of  the  open,  are  immensely 
more  continent  than  man.  Not  only  do  they 
understand  nothing  of  indulgence,  but  it  is 
certain  that  many  birds  and  apparently 
some  quadrupeds  select  their  mates  a  con- 
siderable time  before  they  beget  their  young, 
and  for  reasons  distinguishable  from  imme- 
diate gratification. 

If  you  seek  for  the  true  mark  of  our 
bruteness  you  must  find  it,  not  in  the  excesses 
of  civilisation,  but  in  the  ineradicable  re- 
minder in  primitive  custom  of  a  time  when 
there  was  a  mating  season  for  man  and  a 
period  in  which  the  whole  number  of  his 
progeny  evinced  the  totality  of  his  sex  en- 
counters. Wherever  the  green  bough  of  the 
man  strain  escapes  the  degeneracy  of  isola- 
tion and  subjection,  man  exhibits  still  a  de- 
15 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

gree  of  reticence  and  simplicity  in  his  mat- 
ing behaviours  that  likens  him  with  his  vir- 
tuous and  insensate  brother  the  beast. 

It  is,  no  doubt,  the  vigour  of  the  recoil 
from  the  by-product  of  our  burgeoning 
love-life,  which  leads  us  to  seek  a  figure  of 
licentiousness  in  the  brute,  since  there  is  no 
other  ground  for  it.  Over  and  above  the 
evidence  of  a  mating  season  among  primi- 
tive people — and  the  limits  of  a  permissible 
primitiveness  from  which  we  may  draw  are 
to  be  defined  later — conspicuously  among 
the  tribes  in  a  healthy  state  of  growth,  is 
polygamy  infrequent,  adultery  rare,  and 
prostitution  practically  unknown,  ex- 
cept  

It  is  the  exception  that  establishes  the 
use  of  sex,  over  and  above  the  preservation 
of  the  species,  on  a  plane  with  our  highest 
human  activities.  So  far  as  surviving  con- 
ditions serve  to  show  it,  the  initial  sex  ex- 
16 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

cess  was  social,  public,  and  periodic,  indis- 
solubly  associated  with  those  enterprises 
which  human  society  seeks  most  to  preserve. 
Not  the  scientists,  not  even  Mr.  Darwin, 
though  he  tried  by  deriving  one  from  the 
other,  can  dissever  the  three-plied  root  of 
sex  and  art  and  religion. 

And  if  you  make  a  point  of  what  I  admit, 
that  there  are  no  primitives  known,  there  is 
still  primitiveness,  and  the  evidence  surviv- 
ing in  things  as  inconsiderable  as  the  shape 
of  a  papal  hat  and  the  most  cherished  of  our 
symbols,  to  point  the  attention  back  to  the 
time  when  the  earliest  extra  use  of  sex  was 
worshipful. 

Consider  the  sly,  undefended  beast  man 
was,  kin  to  the  climbers  as  he  dropped  long 
flights  from  bough  to  bough,  companion  to 
jackals  as  by  the  water  holes  he  stalked  his 
daily  kill  or  with  his  mate,  his  young  brood 
at  his  back,  he  ranged  the  deep,  continuous 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

wood — until  the  mate  grew  heavy  and 
sought  caves  and  grassy  hollows  to  await  her 
time ;  against  which  he  ranged  the  farther, 
following  the  game  as  it  shifted  its  feeding 
ground,  consorting  with  other  males  as 
bucks  run  together  at  the  beginning  of  Sep- 
tember, always  and  indefensibly  open  to  the 
influence  of  the  wild. 

And  nature  drew  him  very  much  as  she 
drew  the  deer  and  the  partridge  by  the  re- 
crudescence of  the  year.  Power  that  came 
upon  the  procreant  earth  came  also  upon 
man.  When  the  sun  was  in  Aries,  he  turned 
himself,  as  birds  to  old  nesting  places,  to- 
ward the  immemorial  gathering  place  of 
his  kind. 

There,  when  the  moon  came  up  and 
walked  in  glory  on  the  hills,  when  the  new 
smell  of  the  earth  mixed  with  the  odour 
of  the  budding  forest,  and  the  scrub  was  in 
flower,  the  man  within  man  erected  itself. 
18 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

The  tribe  stood  up ;  they  stamped  the  moist 
earth; they  locked  arms, around  the  red  heap 
of  the  kill,  around  the  rosy  almond  bush; 
they  widened  the  circle,  narrowed  it;  they 
beat  the  earth  with  their  feet  until  it  re- 
sounded. In  the  gullies  bucks  tossed  their 
antlers  with  a  rhythmic  motion,  pawing  the 
wet  sod;  the  cranes  danced  by  the  water 
courses. 

Two  or  three  things  happen  when  men 
move  together  concertedly  from  a  single  im- 
pulse, but  first  and  most  notable  is  the  in- 
crease of  personal  power.  If  they  no  more 
than  sit  at  a  meal  together  they  will  eat 
more,  assimilate  more  readily,  by  the  mere 
contagion  of  vitality.  Judge  how,  when 
they  dance  together  on  windy  hill  fronts  at 
the  tonic  urge  of  spring,  the  mind  of  man 
is  raised  to  the  perception  of  divinity — 
creative  power  seeking  its  release  in  the  im- 
mediate, symbolic,  fructifying  act. 
19 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

No  doubt  there  is  more  to  be  known  of 
this  than  is  good  for  us ;  we  stop  short  of 
making  a  veil  of  things  called  unseemly  be- 
tween the  unaccustomed  vision  and  the  true 
interpretation  of  the  act  by  which  the  sav- 
age at  the  culmination  of  his  dancing,  be- 
tween the  dawn  wind  and  the  dew-wet  sod, 
identified  himself  with  the  male  principle 
of  earth.  The  most  that  I  would  accom- 
plish is  to  have  you  leave  the  reproductive 
service  of  sex  where  it  belongs,  with  the 
physiologist,  and  to  think  of  its  super-func- 
tion as  beginning  not  basely  and  in  corners, 
but  by  social  consent;  and  all  the  cry  of  it, 
the  pain,  the  poetry,  the  dear,  nesting  de- 
light, the  many-coloured  play  of  it  across 
the  surface  of  our  civilisation,  one  with  the 
purr  of  the  warm  earth  turning  her  long 
flanks  to  the  procreant  sun,  and  the  impulse 
that  makes  men  to  sing  and  to  prophesy. 


II 


IT  should  be  easy  even  for  the  material- 
ist to  understand  how  the  revelation 
of  divinity  should  have  come  to  the 
first  men — as  the  meticulacy  of  our  relig- 
ious history  neglects  to  tell  us — through  the 
knowledge  of  creativeness  in  themselves. 

And  what  a  tremendous  piece  of  knowl- 
edge it  was  when  man  discovered  that  by  an 
act  being  could  come  into  the  world  where 
no  being  was  before.  Man  and  God,  they 
met  together  as  makers  of  life.  But  it  must 
have  taken  as  many  instances,  as  much  wag- 
ging of  heads  as  a  modern  theory  of  vaccina- 
tion, to  establish  the  contingency  of  off- 
spring on  the  procreative  act,  and  much 
longer  before  the  assumption  of  other  means 
21 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

and  influences  to  accomplish  the  same  end 
gave  way  to  the  exact  knowledge  of  the 
gynecologist.  All  our  old  wives'  lore  is  full 
of  intimations  of  the  time  when  the  sequence 
was  by  no  means  accepted  as  a  certainty, 
and  it  is  still  possible  to  find  tribes  with 
well  established  marriage  codes  who,  if 
they  desire  children,  feel  it  necessary  to  help 
the  situation  along  by  rites  and  observances. 
One  hesitates  to  rake  up  these  old  family 
scandals  in  an  age  when  it  has  reached  its 
all  but  perfect  apogee,  but  the  fact  is  that 
male  parental  responsibility  is  an  acquired 
characteristic,  a  thing  which,  if  one  insists 
—which  I  do  not — upon  the  disinheritabil- 
ity  of  acquirement,  men  must  have  inherited 
from  their  mothers,  who  can  be  shown  to 
have  had  always  an  appreciable  degree  of 
it.  It  requires  a  steady  countenance  to  face 
in  the  practice  still  extant  among  the  least 
developed  of  the  tribes  of  eating  the  earliest 

22 


LOVE    AND    THE    SOUL    MAKER 

offspring,  the  root  of  the  religious  immola- 
tion of  the  first-born.  But  it  is  worth  the 
loss  of  some  sentiment  to  realise  that  no 
tribesman  would  be  in  a  position  to  dispose 
of  his  own  child  as  a  strange,  uncanny  thing 
which  had  come  from  nobody  knew  where, 
in  a  manner  wholly  inexplicable,  unless  he 
had  been  spending  at  least  the  better  part 
of  a  year  in  the  society  of  its  mother.  But 
in  fact  we  need  not  go  so  far  back  as  that; 
no  further  than  the  ancient  Britons  who  im- 
pregnated their  female  slaves  to  increase 
their  value  before  selling  them,  or  to  the 
newest  Duke  who  denies  his  son  by  the 
chambermaid,  to  realise  that  it  has  not 
been  the  child  which  has  primarily  brought 
men  and  women  together  and  held  them. 
It  holds  them  sometimes  when  the  primary 
reason  has  burned  down  and  fallen  in  the 
ash;  it  has  become  by  the  processes  of  time, 
part  of  the  mating  consciousness  of  today; 
23 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

but  there  is  no  way  to  escape  the  historical 
priority  of  mate-love  over  parental  obliga- 
tion. I  am  not  sure  one  may  not  safely 
reckon  the  latter  as  a  by-product  of  mar- 
riage. It  is  significant  in  this  connection  to 
remember  that  among  birds,  where  male 
obligation  manifests  itself  in  the  desire  to 
incubate,  we  have  also  successive  matings, 
rapidly  recurrent  rhythms  of  mate-love,  ap- 
proaching the  human  status. 

§ 

"Ah,"  cried  Valda  in  a  disappointed  tone, 
"if  you  are  going  to  make  the  chiefest  part 
of  love  the  act  by  which  it  is  expressed, 
you'll  never  get  me  to  believe  it." 

"Wait,"  I  said.  "I  told  you  there  was 
unmistakable  evidence  of  a  mating  period 
for  man,  and  a  time  when  he  was  as  conti- 
nent as  a  beast.  That  first  man  who  made 
a  sacrifice  of  his  first  child  to  the  mysteri- 
24 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

ous,  rending  powers  of  life — what  do  you 
suppose  he  was  about  all  that  nine  months 
before  that,  he  and  the  child's  mother? 
What  do  all  the  wild  pairs  in  the  wood,  the 
prairie,  the  secret  lairs,  who,  having  mated 
once,  do  not  again  until  by  the  recurrent 
season  nature  says  they  may?  Mate-love," 
said  I,  "even  at  the  earliest  maintains  itself 
by  its  psychic  reactions." 

They  are  the  most  obvious  things  about  it. 
One  finds  the  Great  Experimenter  playing 
with  them  all  across  the  field  of  animal  in- 
telligence .  .  .  bird  songs  .  .  .  love  dances 
...  of  that  more  hereafter.  Why  should 
the  buck  lead  out  the  doe  with  threatening 
frontlet  a  summer  long  in  the  interest  of  an 
experience  which  will  not  be  repeated,  or  a 
progeny  of  which  there  is  no  conscious  ex- 
pectation, long  before  the  appearance  of 
which  he  will  be  shunted  back  to  the  society 
of  other  males?  Why,  indeed,  except  at  the 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

urgency  of  a  reaction  which  outlasts  the 
compulsion  of  the  body  by  as  much  as  in 
man  it  outranks  it? 

I  know  of  no  way  to  deal  with  mate-love 
except  as  a  fact,  a  force  by  itself,  which, 
perhaps,  demands  mind  for  its  displaying 
ground;  which  seizes  on  mind  as  the  elec- 
tric fluid  seizes  on  its  machine.  It  produces 
in  us  such  results  as  our  mechanism  admits 
of,  and  nature  is  served  by  them  as  much  as 
by  the  nine-months-belated  offspring.  As 
such  a  force  it  may  be  studied,  its  direc- 
tions noted,  its  reactions  collated,  its  val- 
ues measured.  I  doubt,  indeed,  if  it  be 
truth  to  say  we  love  at  all.  Loving  goes  on 
in  us. 

Beyond  this  point,  to  the  source  and  end 
of  loving,  the  guessing  begins.  It  is  inex- 
tricably bound  up  with  and  affected  by  the 
procreant  act.  What  nobody  attempts  to 
deny,  however,  is  that  the  initial  impulse 
26 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

was  from  the  outside.  Desire  came  upon 
the  earth  with  its  turning  to  the  sun.  An 
irreproachable  materialistic  definition  of 
love  is  that  it  is  the  psychic  accompaniment 


of  an  act,  dictated  by  surcharged  organs, 


whose  rhythm  is  fixed  by  the  alternation  of 
seasons,  occasioned  by  the  revolution  of 
planets  about  the  sun  which  is  itself  deter- 
mined by  a  movement  toward  the  constella- 
tion Hercules.  Such  an  explanation  re- 
minds one  of  the  old  story  about  the  earth 
which  rested  on  the  back  of  a  turtle  which 
rested  on  a  rock  which  was  supported  by  an- 
other rock — rock  all  the  way  down.  The 
most  the  materialist  can  do  for  you  is  to  get 
you  to  the  farthest  fixed  star,  which  is  really 
much  nearer  than  we  are  to  the  reason  why 
we  love.  Perhaps  the  Force,  on  its  way  to 
what  unknowable  end,  seizes  merely  on  the 
mechanisms  of  sex,  too,  to  turn  them  to  its 
use.  At  any  rate  there  is  no  set  of  organs 
27 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

in  the  human  frame  more  susceptible  to  the 
influences  of  what  we  agree  to  call  mind. 

It  needs  be  said,  however,  and  empha- 
sised, that  the  psychic  reactions  of  mate-love 
are  by  no  means  substitutes  for  physical 
passion,  but  the  very  root  and  stock  of  it. 
There  is  a  great  deal  passing  about  faith 
and  chivalry  and  service  as  though  they 
were  a  supernormal  sort  of  wares  and  the 
poets  had  invented  them.  One  needs  only 
to  have  seen  the  wild  stallion  trumpet  up 
his  mares  out  of  the  wet  gullies,  or  the  she- 
wolf  leave  the  prey,  trotting  nose  to  flank 
of  her  captious  lord,  to  realise  that  they  are 
exactly  as  supernormal  as  the  branch  is  to 
the  trunk. 

The  effort  of  early  Christianity  to  eradi- 
cate passion  by  denying  its  pertinence  to 
life,  has  got  us  into  much  difficulty  on  this 
point;  but  not  so  much  as  comes  of  the 
disassociation  of  root  and  branch  through 
28 


LOVE    AND    THE    SOUL    MAKER 

the  natural  circumstance  of  the  remoteness 
of  the  physical  reaction  in  women  and  its 
immediacy  in  man. 

The  tradition  of  love  as  a  more  spiritual- 
ised product  of  femininity  arises  largely  in 
the  fact  of  the  woman  first  becoming  aware 
of  it  through  the  psychic  reactions  it  sets 
up,  unconnected  with  any  physical  intima- 
tion which  she  has  been  taught  to  recognise. 
I  know  of  no  misunderstanding  so  mischiev- 
ous as  this  disassociation  of  source  and  re- 
action which  induces  women  to  deny  the  ex- 
istence of  passion  when  they  have  only 
deferred  its  crisis.  It  leads  to  the  neglect 
of  a  most  important  element  in  the  choos- 
ing of  a  mate,  and  an  affected  disinclination 
to  the  act  by  which  the  divine  inundation 
may  come. 

But  the  loss  is  always  to  the  woman.  It 
is  not  uncommon  to  hear  wives  complain  of 
a  want  of  spiritual  rapport  with  their  hus- 
29 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 


bands  when  all  that  is  required  is  to  have 
the  mechanism  of  sex  set  in  order.  For 
what  is  this  spiritual  rapport  but  the  sum  of 
all  the  reactions  set  in  motion  by  passion  to- 
ward tenderness,  toward  the  assumption  of 
excellence,  toward  the  identification  of  per- 
sonal experience  with  world  processes?  Not 
only  these  exist,  not  superiorly  to  passion, 
but  by  means  of  it,  but  I  doubt  that  there 
can  be  any  informing  intimacy  between  men 
and  women  unless  there  exists  also  the  po- 
tentiality of  passionate  experience.  Com- 
munity of  interest  there  may  be,  but  no  vital- 
ising exchange  without  the  attractions  of  sex 
to  fructify  the  sowing  of  soul  upon  soul. 


All  our  human  functions  are  immensely 

complicated  by  imagination  and  that  form 

of  extraneous  memory  called  literature.  We 

are  greatly  in  need  just  now  of  a  distinction 

30 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

between  those  social  procedures  which  have 
arisen  from  time  to  time  in  the  interest  of 
mate-love  as  our  estimate  of  its  relativity 
to  life  has  varied,  and  the  natural,  unin- 
vented  operations  of  love  itself.  Love  fash- 
ions, unhappily,  do  not  become  obsolete  as 
readily  as  hats,  to  the  great  confusion  of  our 
behaviour. 

There  is  such  a  deal  of  thinking  about 
love  and  deciding  beforehand  how  it  should 
conduct  itself — milling  it  over  with  the  help 
of  current  fiction  and  the  preferred  ethical 
convention.  What  is  imperative  is  to  find 
out  in  what  fashions  love  manifests  itself.  It 
probably  isn't  a  mystery.  The  human  ani- 
mal is  the  only  one  who  affects  profoundly 
not  to  understand  the  female  of  his  species. 
Having  begun  with  the  unargued  assump- 
tion that  she  is  an  inferior  being,  he  prob- 
ably doesn't;  but  in  fact  most  of  such  mys- 
tification which  is  not  produced  for  the 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

trade  is  generally  due  to  differences  in  the 
choice  of  manners  by  which  to  be  loved. 

If  you  court  in  the  style  of  the  stone  age 
and  the  lady  has  a  fancy  for  fourteenth  cen- 
tury Italian,  you  will  come  to  grief  between 
you  unless  you  can  learn  that  all  love  man- 
ners are  but  preferred  modes  for  the  expres- 
sion of  a  reality.  But  if  you  can  accept  as  a 
distinguishing  mark  of  right  passion,  the 
disposition  to  achieve,  then  you  will  get  on 
nicely  even  though  she  could  wish  to  see 
you  leading  a  forlorn  hope  up  a  bayonet- 
bristling  hill,  while  the  circumstances  of 
your  life  prompt  you  to  put  up  a  little  cor- 
ner in  the  Street. 

This  demand  on  the  part  of  the  young  for 
a  highly  dramatised  love-making  manner, 
is  legitimate  and  should  receive  some  atten- 
tion. It  raises  the  key  of  right  passion,  and 
that  in  its  turn  has  undoubtedly  its  effect  on 
the  personal  vitality  of  the  offspring.  What 
32 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

the  young  try  to  bring  forth  in  their  court- 
ships is  the  deep-seated,  racial  evidence  of 
Tightness.  It  is  shaped  to  absurdity  by 
the  unlovely  processes  of  every  day.  Only 
when  in  great  crises  all  our  manners  are 
stilled,  these  age-long  racial  certainties  come 
to  the  surface  of  life  in  heroic  proportions. 
The  mistake  we  make  is  to  impute  them  to 
our  superior  civilisation.  "Women  and 
children  first"  is  by  no  means  the  exquisite 
flower  of  modern  chivalry,  but  the  working 
of  that  natural  law  by  which  the  dog  will 
not  chase  the  vixen  nor  the  wolf  reprove 
his  mate  at  certain  seasons  of  the  year.  It 
proves  in  the  tribes  that  observe  it,  not  how 
far  they  have  come  along  the  highroad,  but 
how  freshly  flows  in  them  still  the  vital 
human  sap.  Nations  in  which,  in  the  face 
of  violent  catastrophes,  the  males  save  them- 
selves first  are  the  nations  that  drop  behind 
in  the  scale  of  civilisation. 
33 


LOVE    AND    THE    SOUL    MAKER 

The  truth  is  that  there  is  no  more  modern 
love  than  there  is  modern  digestion.  There 
are  only  modern  disorders  of  it. 


"Well,  then,"  said  Valda,  when  I  had  got 
as  far  as  this,  "in  what  fashion  is  it?" 

We  were  sitting  still  together;  the  sky 
was  all  the  colour  of  obsidian  and  the  friend- 
ly dark  stood  off  by  the  bay-berry  bushes 
waiting  for  the  withdrawing  of  the  lamp. 
A  little  wisp  of  warmth,  lost  from  the  day, 
came  and  snuggled  down  beside  us;  it  had 
scents  about  it  of  the  dusty  country  road- 
side. 

"Love  is  not  the  same  for  men  and  wom- 
en," insisted  Valda.  She  was  thinking  of 
the  Reactionist. 

"It  depends,"  said  I,  "on  how  far  you 
have  relatively  come  with  it  toward  the  ra- 
cial goal.  He  had  never  caught  up  with 
34 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

you."  I  thought  it  kinder  not  to  say  that  I 
thought  he  never  would  have  been  able  to, 
he  hadn't  Valda's  stride.  Valda  wanted  to 
be  loved  by  the  Superman,  and  his  style  was 
early  Victorian. 


I 


Ill 

opening  movement  of  love  is 
a  sense  of  extraordinary  well-be- 
ing. It  is  a  matter,  if  you  like, 
of  secretions,  of  increased  temperatures,  of 
accelerated  vibrations.  Love  is  a  quicken- 
ing. It  knows  itself  from  other  intoxica- 
tions only  by  the  conviction  that  its  well- 
spring  is  the  person  of  the  beloved. 

The  lover  exposes  himself  to  that  con- 
tagion with  alacrity.  His  exaltation  main- 
tains itself  in  absence  by  the  mere  certainty 
of  the  beloved  being  in  the  world.  When 
passion  is  reciprocated  it  is  capable,  at  this 
stage,  of  producing,  in  some  natures,  defi- 
nite, extra-normal  results,  a  kind  of  clair- 
voyance even,  by  which  the  lovers,  moving 
36 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

each  about  their  separate  affairs,  keep  touch 
with  one  another.  Life  marshalled  by  the 
humming  blood  falls  into  order  and  mean- 
ing. The  whole  personality  sings  to  a 
higher  key. 

Twin  flower  of  this  same  stalk  is  the  at- 
tribution of  every  excellence  to  the  beloved ; 
the  illusion  of  the  best.  It  is  one  of  those 
things,  if  you  want  to  know,  by  which,  to 
me,  personality  is  evinced  in  the  Great  Ex- 
perimenter. Nature,  workaday  drudge,  has 
arranged,  in  the  interest  of  the  improvement 
of  the  species,  that  the  mating  propensity 
should  be  always  toward  the  best — witness 
the  quick  surrenders  of  primitive  women  to- 
ward men  of  the  conquering  race — but  in 
the  ordinary  course  of  things  the  best  can- 
not be  for  everybody.  Shall  the  rest  go  on 
aching?  Not  so  the  Experimenter;  he  sets 
up  this  device  of  the  auto-suggestion  of  pas- 
sion by  which  whatever  is  lacking  is  a  gift 
37 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

to  the  beloved  object  from  the  lover. 
Should  not  this  fever  in  me  have  some  high 
and  commensurable  source?  So  the  Soul 
Maker  assists  nature  in  the  disposition  even 
of  her  damaged  articles. 

Life  proceeds  greatly  by  these  values 
which  we  bestow  on  one  another.  "You  can 
make  anything  you  like  of  me,"  protests  the 
lover  to  his  lady;  which  is  probably  an  ex- 
aggeration. This  stage  of  passion  is  hyp- 
noidal,  amenable  to  suggestion  in  line  with 
its  characteristic  tendency,  which  is  toward 
the  dramatisation  of  the  personality  in  terms 
of  behaviour.  What  the  lover  will  do  under 
the  stimulus  of  passion  is  very  largely  de- 
termined by  the  preferred  behaviours  of  his 
time.  There  was  a  Saxon  once  who  as- 
saulted a  monastery  and  slew  eighty  monks 
single-handed  as  a  way  of  exemplifying  the 
superiority  of  his  mistress  over  all  other 
ladies.  Really  she  might  have  been  quite 
38 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

uninteresting;  all  that  the  incident  proved 
was  what  the  lover  was  capable  of,  ener- 
gised to  his  highest  plane  by  forces  which 
she  had  inducted  to  him. 

It  is  by  this  capacity  for  releasing  unsus- 
pected forms  of  energy  that  passion  justifies 
itself,  even  though  no  children  come  of  it. 
It  is  a  natural,  automatic  method  of  raising 
men  to  their  highest  plane  of  activity;  and 
it  is  worthy  of  note  that  deliberate  celibates 
have  commonly  to  resort  to  deliberate  means 
of  prayer,  asceticism,  or  artificially  stimu- 
lated enthusiasms  to  keep  themselves  at 
the  norm  of  human  efficiency.  For  chief 
among  the  uses  of  passion  is  the  raising  of 
the  percentage  of  values  in  those  who  en- 
tertain it. 

We  have  a  way  of  urging  people  de- 
prived of  their  lawful  occasions  to  "make 
themselves  happy" ;  that  is  to  say,  set  up  in 
themselves  by  taking  pains  that  sense  of 
39 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

well-being,  of  accelerated  energies,  which 
flows  naturally  and  inevitably  from  a 
healthy,  reciprocated,  human  passion. 

All  this,  in  a  degree  and  for  a  time,  pas- 
sion accomplishes  for  all  of  us  by  means  of 
its  psychic  reactions.  We  have  hardly  any 
means  of  knowing  how  long  it  could  main- 
tain itself  in  a  state  of  suspension.  The  poets 
have  furnished  us  with  some  notable  in- 
stances, but  it  is  to  be  remembered  that 
Dante  was  living  more  or  less  comfortably 
with  his  wife  much  of  the  time  he  was  vis- 
iting Beatrice  in  Paradise;  and  though 
Petrarch's  sonnets  were  inspired  by  the  lady 
of  his  affections,  he  had,  I  believe,  a  child 
by  his  housekeeper.  Unquestionably  the 
tendency  of  passion  divorced  too  long  from 
its  native  expression  is  toward  morbidity. 
Moreover  there  are  distinct  psychic  values 
of  mate-love  which  do  not  come  into  exis- 
tence without  the  reality  of  marriage,  and 
40 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

are  appreciably  lessened  by  long  suspen- 
sions. In  particular,  I  refer  to  the  reaction 
of  voluntary  seclusion. 

It  is  the  instinct  of  right  mates,  as  soon 
as  mating  is  accomplished,  or  in  the  settled 
intimacy  of  betrothal,  to  withdraw  from  the 
attention,  even  the  most  innocent,  of  other 
lovers — a  disposition  so  rooted  in  our  love- 
life  that  not  the  most  sophisticated  society 
succeeds  in  quite  breaking  it  down.  It  is 
older  than  our  life,  more  imperative.  In 
the  social  animals  it  serves  to  lead  them 
apart  from  the  herd  for  months  after  mat- 
ing is  accomplished,  though  there  is  noth- 
ing except  the  pleasure  of  companionship 
to  come  of  that  adventure.  Here  again 
one  catches  the  Experimenter  at  work,  for 
that  this  withdrawal  is  not  in  the  imme- 
diate interest  of  the  young  is  evident 
from  the  fact  that  in  the  higher  species, 
and  very  probably  in  primitive  man,  the 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

males  are  temporarily  returned  to 
the  social  group  during  the  crisis  of  ma- 
ternity. 

The  suggestion  put  forward  sometimes  by 
those  who  wish  by  it  to  purchase  an  unre- 
proved  licence  for  themselves,  that  the  vir- 
tue of  women  is  an  acquired  characteristic 
created  by  the  artificial  restraints  of  man, 
has  no  support  from  the  little  we  know  of 
initial  human  history.  It  has  no  support, 
either,  in  what  we  know  today  of  the  as- 
sault, deception,  drugging,  and  abducting, 
necessary  to  supply  the  demand  of  men 
whom  no  compulsion  drives  to  what  they 
do.  The  impulse  of  fidelity  in  the  female 
is  as  old  as  mind,  whether  she  be  one  only 
or  one  of  many,  she  turns  after  mating  to 
follow  the  mate.  Threatened  in  her  in- 
violateness  she  invites,  she  demands,  his 
sanction  for  it  and  his  insistence.  She  is 
the  prize,  not  of  any  wantonness  of  her  own, 
42 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

but  of  a  second  male's  ability  to  maintain 
more  successfully  that  instinctive  seclusion, 
more  potent  with  females  than  appetite. 
Plain  ignorance  of  the  facts  of  animal  life 
is  responsible  for  much  confusion  on  this 
point.  The  male  does  not  protect  his  mate 
from  being  fought  by  other  males  or  being 
abused  by  them,  but  from  being  loved  by 
them. 

In  its  initiative  this  secluding  instinct  was 
no  doubt  to  protect  the  impregnated  female 
from  the  persecution  of  similar  attempts, 
but  one  sees  the  Soul  Maker  seizing  on  the 
exalted  states  of  the  mating  period  to  fix  in 
the  species  habits  of  the  highest  value  to  its 
ultimate  development.  Here,  long  in  ad- 
vance of  any  need  of  it,  is  developed  the 
quality  of  protectiveness  in  the  male.  Here 
the  buck  brandishes  his  antlers  and  re- 
hearses on  behalf  of  his  brother  man  the 
dominant  male  attitude  which  has  had  so 
43 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

much  to  do  with  the  form  of  our  social  or- 
ganisation. 

Undoubtedly  many  of  our  reluctantly  re- 
signed marriage  customs  have  arisen  in  the 
effort  to  externalise  reactions  of  the  mating 
period,  felt  to  be  so  right  as  to  merit  per- 
manence. It  is  not  unlikely  that  the  idea 
of  property  in  women  acquired  a  certain 
sanction  from  the  subconscious  perception 
of  naturalness  in  the  abnegation  by  the  mate 
of  all  other  male  interests,  a  naturalness 
which  has  made  it  easy  for  society  to  fasten 
on  women  the  artificial  compulsions  that 
attempt  to  recognise  the  Tightness  of  se- 
clusion by  making  it  an  institution.  Wom- 
en suffered  it,  sensing  no  tyranny  in  a  re- 
striction so  agreeable  to  their  natural  in- 
stincts. But  women  have  paid  for  it  in  the 
weakening  of  character  by  forcible  re- 
straint. Loyalty  of  the  mate  is  a  psychic 
reaction  and  in  normal  conditions  is  com- 
44 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

petent  to  maintain  itself  in  the  presence  of 
great  personal  freedoms. 

§ 

Here  then  is  the  spoor  of  right  passion 
all  across  our  history;  but  nature  will  have 
a  surer  mark.  For  mate-love  is  distinguish- 
able from  all  the  cross-bred,  ring-streaked 
and  striped  hybrids  got  by  convention  on 
society,  all  the  pale  stalks  come  up  in  un- 
sunned cellars  of  fortuitous  celibacy,  by 
three  high  signs.  It  manifests  itself  as  a  de- 
sire for  permanent,  public,  and  exclusive 
relation. 

I  say  desire  for.  I  no  more  profess  that 
mate-love  fulfils  itself  in  modern  society 
than  that  the  undeveloped,  overfed,  slack- 
shouldered,  bow-legged  bodies  that  go  up 
and  down  our  streets  represent  the  physical 
fulfilment  of  men.  Let  us  go  slowly  here 
and  perhaps  we  shall  go  together. 
45 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

You  will  hardly  deny  me  the  element  of 
publicity.  It  is  the  unfailing  characteristic. 
Right  love  rejoices  not  only  in  calling  so- 
ciety to  witness,  but  in  inviting  the  attention 
of  whatever  gods  may  be.  The  wedding 
feast  is  the  earliest  known  personal  social 
occasion,  and  there  is  not  wanting  evidence 
that  it  is  one  of  the  earliest  religious  cere- 
monies. I  can  learn  of  no  tribe  that  has 
not  some  method  of  public  and  solemn 
attestation  either  immediate,  or  in  the 
nature  of  an  annual  ceremony  partici- 
pated in  by  all  the  pairs  that  have  mated 
that  year. 

For  right  love  is  its  own  justification;  it 
breaks  down  the  barriers  of  discretion;  it 
demands  publicity  even  at  the  price  of  scorn. 
And  the  faith  on  which  it  dares  so  much  is 
faith  in  its  own  permanence. 

It  is  the  distinguishing  mark  of  mate-love 
to  deem  itself  .undying.  That  it  is  not  al- 
46 


LOVE   AND   THE   SOUL   MAKER 

ways  so  is  beside  the  mark.  Constancy  in 
love  is  very  much  a  matter  of  character  in 
him  who  entertains  it;  good  steel  subjected 
to  the  electric  current  remains  a  permanent 
magnet;  soft  iron  returns  to  the  condition 
of  soft  iron.  We  cannot  require  more  of 
man  or  metal  than  that  they  bear  witness  to 
the  true  magnetic  fluid.  Mate-love  is  also 
liable  to  the  disintegrating  influence  of  all 
the  other  exigencies  which  we  have  tied  up 
with  it,  though  with  no  more  generic  claim 
than  the  can  to  the  dog's  tail.  Passion  en- 
gendered in  an  unstable  temperament  or  in 
the  soil  of  immaturity,  subjected  to  our 
modern  strain,  may  easily  fail  of  the  con- 
dition of  permanence,  but  no  laughter 
should  attend  upon  its  profession.  It  is  the 
stroke  which  ushers  marriage  on  the  scene. 
And  marriage  is  the  Soul  Maker's  mark, 
for  marriage  means  stable  conditions,  and 
that  means  the  improvement  of  the  race, 
47 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

which  so  far  as  we  can  surmise  is  what  the 
Soul  Maker  is  after. 

§ 

"It's  true  enough,"  Valda  admitted,  "but 
there  are  other  things  to  be  taken  into  con- 
sideration." 

"What  things?"  I  knew  perfectly,  but  I 
wished  Valda  to  state  them  for  herself. 

"Well— there's  unloving " 

"I'm  coming  to  that.  And  what  others?" 
"What  they  are  always  telling  us,  you 
know,  about  there  having  been  all  forms  of 
marriage  in  the  world,  and  about  the  primi- 
tive horde."  By  "they"  she  meant  the  group 
of  social  malcontents  who  insist  on  being 
called  advanced  on  the  ground  that  they 
find  themselves  different.  Not  that  I  mean 
malcontent  for  a  term  of  opprobrium,  I'm 
one  myself  in  particular  directions,  but 
Valda's  friends  managed  to  give  to  it  the 
48 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

standing  of  a  profession.  Besides  there  is  a 
difference  between  going  forward  and  going 
about  like  a  water  bug  in  the  circle  of  your 
own  limitations. 

"They  tell  us,"  she  insisted,  "that  man  is 
naturally  and  actually  polygamous." 

"Yes — if  by  'naturally'  you  mean  that 
under  certain  conditions  he  takes  to  it  as 
easily  as,  in  the  absence  of  proper  flesh 
food,  he  takes  to  cannibalism ;  but  no,  if  you 
mean  that  promiscuity  is  to  be  taken  as  a 
species  mark  as  you  take  his  disposition  to 
be  combative  and  predatory.  But  in  any 
case  you  wouldn't  have  us  hark  back  to 
those  naturalistic  tendencies." 

Valda  was  shocked.  As  a  rule  there  is 
nothing  your  avowed  free-lover  insists  on 
so  much  as  that  all  the  passions  of  greed, 
ambition,  love  of  power,  mere  unrestrained 
love  of  doing  even,  when  it  leads  man  to 
advance  himself  in  the  possession  of  goods, 
49 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

should  be  checked  and  bridled.  But  the 
argument  that  all  men  should  be  openly 
promiscuous  because  many  of  them  are  se- 
cretly so,  is  valid  only  when  you  go  far 
enough  to  say  that  all  men  should  rob  be- 
cause a  few  privately  peculate,  and  freely 
kill  because  they  freely  hate.  It  is  not  the 
thing  that  man  is  found  doing  at  any  par- 
ticular time  that  establishes  the  law,  but  his 
general  direction.  All  that  we  turn  back 
the  pages  of  life  for,  is  to  find  out  what  life 
is  about.  The  point  at  which  love  begins 
concerns  us  only  as  a  means  of  finding  out 
where  it  is  going. 

For  love  is  by  no  means  an  end  in  itself ; 
it  must  get  forward,  it  travels  toward  a 
mark. 

The  truth  about  the  "primitive  horde" 

theory  is  that  it  is  merely  a  theory,  advanced 

as  a  possible  explanation  of  certain  elements 

of  primitive  society  which  have  not  yet 

50 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

yielded  up  their  process  of  evolution.  So 
far  as  we  have  any  dependable  account  of 
early  man,  we  find  him  with  two  marked 
social  determinations:  marriage  of  some 
sort,  that  is,  a  set  of  rules  and  rituals  gov- 
erning his  mating  habits;  and  a  custom  of 
marrying  outside  of  certain  bonds,  fixed  in 
a  general  way  by  what  he  understands  as 
consanguinity.  The  hypothesis  which  in 
some  quarters  is  thought  best  to  account  for 
these  is  that  of  an  original  group  of  females 
and  their  young,  centred  about  some  no- 
table male;  which  group  might  be  aug- 
mented from  time  to  time  by  annexing  wom- 
en of  his  slaughtered  enemies,  or  decimated 
by  desertions  of  the  young  for  more  suit- 
able mates.  From  such  a  group  young 
males,  as  soon  as  their  approaching  ma- 
turity menaced  the  supremacy  of  the 
patriarch,  would  be  driven  to  run  with 
the  "gang"  of  other  adolescent  bachelors; 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

a  race  habit  which  still  asserts  itself 
wherever  the  social  organisation  gives  it 
room. 

Such  youths  then,  in  the  recurrent  urge 
of  the  mating  season,  stole  or  enticed  brides 
where  they  found  them  and  began  the  for- 
mation of  new  groups  around  a  single  pair. 
It  is  possible  also  that  young  women,  bound 
to  the  group  by  ties  of  association,  timid  of 
the  wild,  might  have  consented  to  be  loved 
without  detaching  themselves  from  the  par- 
ent stem,  might  even  have  demanded  some 
capitulation  on  the  part  of  the  lover  as  a 
condition  of  being  loved  at  all.  And  in 
time,  as  his  eyes  dimmed  and  his  strength 
went  from  him,  the  patriarch  himself 
might  have  been  glad  to  make  livable  terms 
with  his  sons  or  the  husbands  of  his  daugh- 
ters, to  save  himself  from  what  must  too 
often  have  been  his  bitter  finish,  driven  by 
young  bucks  of  his  species  aside  and  apart 
52 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL    MAKER 

to  range  the  wood  like  some  deposed,  dis- 
antlered  leader  of  the  herd. 

That  some  such  natural,  social  formation 
as  this  preceded  the  stage  known  to  us  as 
tribal,  is  generally  conceded.  But  since  the 
patriarchate  still  leaves  something  unex- 
plained of  the  nearly  universal  practice  of 
exogamy — that  is,  the  rule  which  deter- 
mined what  groups  might  or  might  not  be 
mated  with— it  is  assumed  that  a  state  of 
complete  promiscuity  must  have  preceded 
even  the  primary  group.  One  must  bear  in 
mind,  however,  that  it  is  purely  an  assump- 
tion, based  on  the  belief  that  the  primitive 
horror  of  any  violation  of  sexual  exclusive- 
ness  is  derived  from  experience  rather  than 
instinct.  Two  or  three  things  render  this 
unlikely.  The  first  is  that  if  exogamy  is 
the  fruit  of  experience,  there  is  no  reason 
why  opportunity  for  experiential  certainty 
might  not  have  arisen  within  the  family 
53 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

group,  out  of  such  sporadic  relations  as 
might  be  allowed  to  the  liability  of  human 
nature.  In  the  second  place,  the  tribal  ban 
as  we  know  it  in  too  many  instances,  has 
nothing  to  do  with  anything  which  could 
properly  be  called  consanguinity,  and  the 
factor  of  experience,  if  it  were  allowed  at 
all,  would  quickly  contradict  the  supposed 
basis.  Moreover,  recent  investigation  into 
the  facts  of  cross-breeding  has  by  no  means 
tended  to  confirm  the  notion  that  the  motive 
behind  exogamy  could  be  even  very  largely 
experiential.  But  the  most  persistent  advo- 
cate of  the  theory  that  a  condition  of  not 
marrying  certain  people  must  have  arisen 
out  of  a  previous  condition  of  marrying 
just  anybody,  must  still  take  account  of  cer- 
tain facts. 

First  at  hand  is  the  persistent  effort  of 
nature  to  maintain  the  balance  of  popula- 
tion, for  every  man  a  woman,  so  that  for  the 
54 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

patriarch  to  have  segregated  two  or  more  of 
them  implied,  in  the  long  run,  an  artificial 
decimation  of  males  by  war  or  the  accidents 
of  the  chase.  Nature,  when  she  makes  a 
species,  fixes  its  mating  habit;  it  comes 
ready  made  with  the  species  mark,  and  the 
range  of  variation  within  the  species  is  not 
wide  enough  to  enable  man  by  artificial  re- 
straints very  greatly  to  override  it.  Breeders 
in  all  the  centuries  have  not  been  able  to 
mate  doves  except  in  pairs,  and  elephants 
resist  the  effort  to  force  their  inclination 
with  what,  among  humans,  amounts  to  hero- 
ism. One  anticipates  that  the  mating  habit 
of  man,  augmented  by  imagination  and  the 
aesthetic  consciousness,  will  show  a  greater 
range  of  adaptability;  but  if,  as  the  balance 
of  sexes  seems  to  indicate,  the  original  im- 
pulse is  by  pairs,  there  must  easily  be  a 
point  beyond  which  the  variation  cannot  be 
pushed  without  proving  hurtful  to  the  spe- 
55 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

cies.  It  is  not  a  question  whether  some  form 
of  promiscuity  may  not  be  present  in  society 
as  persistently  as  the  trace  of  iron  in  spring 
water;  the  real  test  is,  when  such  a  form  of  it 
is  entertained  in  a  determining  degree,  what 
does  it  do  to  the  host?  Fortunately  the  facts 
by  which  such  damage  may  be  demonstrated 
lie  too  close  to  the  surface  to  make  it  neces- 
sary to  recount  them. 

What  polygamy,  which  all  nations  seem 
to  have  picked  up  in  the  course  of  their 
wars,  does  to  the  nations  that  have  not  yet 
discarded  it,  may  be  learned  at  the  high 
school.  What  the  polygamous  habit,  per- 
sisting long  after  the  theory  of  it  is  discred- 
ited by  society,  has  to  do  with  existing  evils, 
has  yet  to  be  discussed.  I  but  pause  here  to 
turn  back  its  earliest  pages  to  protest  against 
the  effort  to  stifle  the  secret  word  love  whis- 
pers to  the  soul,  by  deductions  from  the  mat- 
ing habits  of  far-called  tribes,  torn  shreds 
56 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

of  nations,  feeble  and  few,  degenerate  or 
arrested  in  development  by  the  very  habits 
adduced.  As  well  undertake  to  prescribe 
the  training  of  the  healthy  human  child  by 
the  behaviour  of  an  adult  idiot 

If  the  behaviour  of  existing  tribes  is  to 
be  ensampled  at  all,  let  it  at  least  be  where 
there  is  a  normal  process  of  growth,  as  in 
the  case  of  American  Indians  who  were  on 
the  point  of  inventing  an  alphabet  when 
Europe  interrupted  them,  among  whom 
traces  of  the  annual  mating  season  are  still 
found,  and  the  simple,  excluding,  lifelong 
mating  habit  preponderates,  or  among  those 
magnificent  South  Sea  islanders  who  are  re- 
puted first  to  have  learned  of  adultery  from 
the  Christian  missionaries. 

What  does  stand  out  across  the  tribes  is 
the  stripe  of  marriage,  the  attempt  to  ex- 
ternalise in  rituals,  in  prohibitions  and  pen- 
alties, the  universal  human  conviction  that 
$7 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

there  enters  into  sex  relations  a  moral  ele- 
ment, things  that  may  or  may  not  be  done 
for  the  good  of  the  community.  The  meas- 
ure of  immunity  of  unfaithfulness  has  never 
been  calculated  on  the  kind  of  marriage  but 
on  the  fact  of  it.  In  group  marriages  infi- 
delities outside  the  group  are  as  reprehen- 
sible as  individual  delinquencies  with  us, 
and  judgment  to  a  fifteenth  wife  is  not 
meted  out  to  her  as  being  one-fifteenth  as 
blamable,  but  on  the  relation  of  her  con- 
duct to  a  racial  instinct. 

§ 

More  striking  and  dramatic  even  than 
the  evidences  of  struggle  toward  its  ultimate 
mark,  are  the  public  and  immediate  reac- 
tions which  mate-love  sets  up  against  any 
infringement  of  its  inviolateness.  I  refer  to 
sex  jealousy  and  that  movement  which 
drives  apart  the  participators  in  a  relation 
58 


LOVE    AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

which  has  no  sanction  other  than  mere  bod- 
ily appetite;  the  impulse  which  turns  a 
man's  hand  upon  the  poor  puppet  of  his  de- 
sires, that  makes,  long  before  church  and 
state  were  there  to  take  a  hand  in  it,  an 
avoidance  and  a  derision  of  the  prostitute. 

Jealousy  is  the  psychic  reaction  by  which 
the  naturalness  of  the  exclusive  relation 
makes  itself  evident  in  any  breach.  It  is  the 
subconscious  conviction  of  the  extra-par- 
ticipation of  both  members  of  a  pair  in  the 
union  which  the  mating  act  implies ;  the  un- 
premeditated, unexperienced,  immediate 
witness  to  the  bond  which  by  that  act 
comes  into  being.  It  is  as  imperative  as  the 
impulse  of  the  man  attacked  to  strike  back, 
and  probably  as  self-protective.  It  arises 
naturally  in  our  brother  the  beast;  mixed 
with  the  grief  of  loss  and  the  bitterness  of 
betrayal,  it  becomes  the  most  rending  of  our 
human  tragedies,  and  informs  even  the  be- 
59 


LOVE    AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

haviour  of  those  who  seek  to  deny  it  by  sub- 
stituting withdrawal  for  the  ancient,  instinc- 
tive movement  of  reprisal.  Under  all  our 
social  reprobation  it  is  still  a  motive  force 
shaping  our  marriage  institutions. 

A  growing  modern  dislike  for  the  forms 
under  which  jealousy  has  expressed  itself 
is  partly  responsible  for  our  neglect  of  it  as 
a  true  symptom  of  mate-love.  We  shrink 
from  the  torment  of  this  most  instinctive  of 
natural  protests.  Few  dare  trust  themselves 
to  the  rack  of  such  a  reality  to  learn,  as 
through  its  revelations  one  must,  love's  final 
word.  They  fear  the  pain,  they  fear  its 
hurrying  them  through  any  personal  weak- 
ness into  acts  retributive  rather  than  correc- 
tive; most  of  all  they  fear  the  modern  an- 
athema of  "hysterical"  by  which  too  many 
of  our  native  impulses  are  damned  by  those 
in  whom  they  have  withered  away.  Much 
of  the  attempted  repression  of  this  active 
60 


LOVE    AND    THE    SOUL    MAKER 

reagent  is  of  the  stripe  of  that  triumph  of 
fashion  over  instinct  which  enables  the 
stomach  to  put  up  with  caviar  and  rotting 
cheese.  Man,  who  has  lost  his  native  abil- 
ity to  distinguish  between  poisonous  and 
non-poisonous  foods,  stands  to  lose,  as  our 
estimate  of  their  relative  values  varies  with 
the  changing  ethical  mode,  his  power  of 
discriminating  the  racial  aptitudes  by  which 
we  lay  hold  of  life.  The  importance  of  sex 
jealousy  is  not  the  part  it  plays  in  the  com- 
fort or  discomfort  of  those  experiencing  it, 
but  in  the  light  it  throws  on  the  purpose  of 
the  Soul  Maker. 

It  is  worth  while  remembering  in  this 
connection  that  jealousy  where  it  arises 
among  our  brother  beasts,  is  not  in  any  way 
connected  with  maintenance.  Neither  is  it 
a  protest  against  an  act,  an  act  probably  not 
remembered  and  still  less  anticipated,  but 
against  violations  of  the  relation  which  by 
61 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

that  act  comes  into  being.  Wild  mate  re- 
mands wild  mate  to  its  obligation  long  after 
the  seasonal  impulse  has  spent  itself.  "Con- 
jugal rights,"  at  which  term  the  modern 
protestant  is  known  to  froth  at  the  mouth, 
is  still  somewhat  older  than  humanity. 

It  is  probable  that  much  of  the  present 
day  complaisance  over  violations  of  mari- 
tal obligations,  arises  out  of  the  realisation 
that  infidelity  is  so  frequently  not  infidelity 
to  a  true  marriage  bond,  but  to  an  arrange- 
ment in  which  the  item  of  "support"  has 
shifted  the  ground  from  passion  to  prop- 
erty. Not  to  have  experienced  jealousy  is 
not  necessarily  to  have  risen  superior  to  it. 
It  is  sometimes  due  to  having  never  truly 
mated. 

Of  that  other  internal  test  of  the  right  re- 
lation, I  mean  the  reaction  of  disgust,  of 
cruelty  even,  no  proper  study  can  be  made 
from  the  outside  as  I  must  make  it.  Traces 
62 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

of  the  disposition  of  man  to  hold  cheap  the 
woman  who  has  met  him  outside  the  tribal 
ban,  lie  deep  in  all  our  literature;  it  is  testi- 
fied to  by  many  who  have  no  notion  what  it 
proves  against  them.  It  is  the  root  of  much 
of  the  ignominy  heaped  upon  the  prostitute, 
against  whom,  even  among  tribes  that  show 
definite  symptoms  of  degeneracy,  it  is  pos- 
sible still  to  find  the  ribald  jest  and  the  de- 
riding finger.  One  needs  only  to  read  the 
confessions  of  men  great  enough  to  confess 
freely,  to  know  that  there  are  relations  go- 
ing on  among  us  of  which  the  immediate 
reaction  is  revolt.  What  we  have  here  is 
probably  the  advice  of  life  subconsciously 
aware  of  what  is  not  good  for  it;  such  a 
health-preserving  movement  as  leads  to  the 
rejection  of  food  with  which  eye  and  intel- 
ligence find  no  fault.  The  pity  of  it  is  that 
the  point  should  be  so  persistently  missed, 
that  the  social  mark  should  be  set  not  so 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

much  against  the  act  as  against  the  victim 
of  it 


It  has  been  pointed  out  that  the  habit  of 
remaining  together  had  made  its  appear- 
ance among  the  mating  pairs  some  time  be- 
fore the  reproductive  sequence  had  estab- 
lished itself  as  a  part  of  common  knowledge. 
But  even  in  the  face  of  that  certainty,  there 
arose  very  early  the  need  of  justifying  hu- 
man passion  superiorly  to  itself.  It  can  be 
found  among  peoples  where  you  cannot  find 
to  lay  with  it  a  scrap  of  metal  or  a  potsherd 
• — everywhere,  Greek,  Bantu,  Bushman, 
turning  to  religion  for  the  sanction  of  their 
love,  for  the  occasion  and  extenuation  of 
their  excesses,  drawing  a  veil  of  mystic  rites 
over  their  unspeakable  performance.  And 
everywhere  across  the  tribes  sounds  the  high 
note  of  deliberate  continence  in  the  interests 
64 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

of  the  spiritual  endowment;  the  effort  to 
attain  the  super-union  by  denying  the  act 
which  is  its  overt  sign.  Before  men  fully 
clothed  themselves  they  had  arrived  at  the 
use  of  sexual  abstinence  as  a  means  of  rais- 
ing the  plane  of  personal  power. 


"You  mean,"  said  Valda,  "that  every- 
where men  suspected  a  moral  basis  for  their 
love-life,  and  were  fumbling  to  find  it?" 

"Wait,"  I  said,  "the  wind  is  talking." 
We  could  hear  it  moving  down  the  country 
road  where  the  elms  bent  and  bowed  to  it, 
rehearsing  the  ancient  ritual  of  their  kind. 
By  the  bridge  it  broke  blunderingly  up  the 
draw  where  we  heard  it  whimpering  among 
the  dogwood  and  the  alders.  It  must  have 
been  a  ruse  merely  to  distract  our  attention, 
for  the  next  moment  it  rushed  us  from 
across  the  grass  lots  where  the  new-cut  tim- 
65 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

othy  lay  in  windrows,  whirling  up  glitter- 
ing dried  stalks  of  it  high  under  the  moon, 
as  it  went  on  to  wake  the  pines.  They  stood 
out  darkly  on  the  crown  of  the  hill  above 
the  field,  forever  and  darkly  busy  to  retake 
the  reaches  of  the  ancient  wood.  Valda's 
mind  still  ran  on  the  phase  of  the  subject 
that  had  last  hung  in  the  air  between  us. 

"Be  still,"  I  warned  her,  "there's  some- 
thing coming  to  me  from  over  there  among 
the  pines."  We  could  see  them  fingering 
down  the  wind  for  the  communicating 
touch. 

It  came  to  me  out  of  the  past — from 
dusky  figures  stealing  out  of  the  wet  fields 
when  the  moon  was  up  and  the  rice  in 
flower — from  the  Green  Corn  dance — from 
all  rites  and  ceremonies  whereby  man  iden- 
tified the  processes  of  nature  with  those  go- 
ing on  in  himself.  It  came  from  blasted 
Thebes — from  Job  clearing  himself  pas- 
66 


sionately  from  the  fire  that  consumeth  to  de- 
struction and  the  horror  that  reaches  down, 
so  deep  down  that  no  keen  and  powerful 
intellect  has  yet  followed  it  to  the  root  of 
the  world.  Somewhere  there  in  the  dark  I 
felt  the  cold  muzzle  of  the  beast  brother  at 
my  hand,  and  the  thread  of  the  one  thing  the 
race  has  known  as  it  knew  the  way  to  its 
mother's  breast,  one  thing  it  has  never  let 
go  of — that  there  is  a  right  use  of  mate-love 
and  a  wrong  use  of  it,  a  pure  and  impure, 
an  energising,  Godward  use,  a  disintegrat- 
ing, cankering  use;  and  all  forms  and  cere- 
monies are  but  the  attempt  to  determine  and 
define,  to  put,  as  it  were,  the  bar  between 
the  personal  adventure  and  the  racial  ex- 
perience of  disaster — an  attempt  to  render 
in  terms  of  human  institutions  the  thing  love 
knows  when  first  it  gains  a  footing  in  con- 
sciousness, itself  an  excluding,  enduring,  as- 
cending force. 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

"I  know "  said  Valda.  "I've  always 

known — we've  always  known,"  she  cor- 
rected herself.  "That's  why  we  women 
trust  so  much.  It  is  so  right,  so  natural  for 
love  to  go  on,  to  reach  the  external  mark. 
How  do  you  suppose  we  knew?" 

"Nature  wouldn't  have  left  us  so  unde- 
fended," I  was  sure.  "It  was  necessary  for 
women  to  know  what  lay  so  close  to  the 
processes  of  life.  All  the  time  we've  known 
a  lot  of  things  that  we  are  only  just  finding 
out."  She  took  fire  from  me;  all  the  stuff 
of  experience  flared  up. 

"Speak,  Oh,  speak  for  us !"  she  whispered. 

So  I  began  to  speak  to  her  about  the  Word 
That  Came  to  Women. 


When  woman  lay  in  the  womb  of  the  world, 
Ere  the  heart  of  the  world  was  divided, 
Before  there  was  faith  or  forsaking, 

68 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL    MAKER 

They  heard  what  the  high  gods  said — 
Making,  unmaking — 

Heard  it  small  and  apart  as  a  spider 
Dropped  from  her  gossamer  thread 
Heareth  far  overhead 
The  talk  of  the  forest — 

Darkly  as  pines  that  confer 

With  their  high  tops  bound  together 

In  the  Wills  that  blow  between  the  worlds, 

Fingering  the  Wills  for  the  thread 

That  binds  the  upper  world  and  the  nether — 

The  will  of  each  to  each  in  its  kind, 

And  the  will  of  all  to  Oneness. 

"Lo,"  said  the  makers  of  men, 

Ere  man  was  moulded, 

Sitting  under  the  Wills  as  in  dreams  men  should  see 

them 

Shaping  our  eldern  earth  under  an  Ash-tree, 
"Sow  we  the  Word  unto  Life  as  the  linden 
Scatters  her  summer  winged  seeds  to  the  windy  spaces, 
Even  so  as  it  falls,  we  shall  take  council  together 
For  the  sake  of  man  that  we  make,  lest  the  Wills  rend 

him — 
Eyeless,  untiring,  rotting,  reforming — 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

Binding  him  fast  unto  Life,  we  shall  fend  him 
With  the  will  of  each  unto  each  in  his  kind 
And  the  will  of  all  to  Oneness." 

Then  the  Word  went  glinting  forth, 

As  between  the  sun  and  the  dawning 

The  silken  fleets  of  the  milkweed 

Sail  in  the  windless  air  above  the  marshes, 

In  the  days  when  the  Man  within  man 

Stood  up  from  the  Beast  his  brother, 

And  suddenly  Life  was  stirred, 

As  the  prows  in  the  harbour 

Move  all  at  once  and  together, 

When  the  land  wind  begins, 

And  deeper  than  surf  or  tide 

The  sea  dreams  of  adventure. 

Up  leaped  the  doe  from  the  fern 

When  the  buck  belled  her, 

Leaving  the  uncropped  scrub  and  the  bindweed  blos- 
som, 

Following  nose  on  flank,  dappled  and  antlered; 

Afar  at  her  killing  the  voice  of  the  lonely  land 

Answered  the  roar  of  her  lord  in  the  hot  blue  dawn- 
ing; 

Mellowly  out  of  his  thicket  whistled  the  hermit  thrush, 

And  "True — true — true" — moaned  the  doves  by  the 
water  courses. 

70 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

Small  and  afar  as  a  spider  climbs  to  the  sun 

The  woman  climbed  up  to  life  by  the  thread  from  her 

body  spun, 

And  she  marked  through  the  leaf  and  bloom  of  life 
How  the  changing  patterns  run 
In  the  Wills  that  blow  across  the  world 
As  the  wind  across  the  wheat, 
And  the  opal  bubbles  of  love  frothed  up 
And  broke  in  slime  at  her  feet. 
But  she  braved  the  rending  forces, 
And  she  dared  the  Wills  to  meet, 
For  the  word  was  in  her  bosom 
Ere  ever  life  begun, 
The  will  of  each  to  each  in  its  kind 
And  the  will  of  us  all  to  One. 


IV 


BUT  in  spite  of  it  all,"  Valda  in- 
sisted, "all  the  evidence  which  na- 
ture seems  to  produce  in  favour  of 
guaranteed  relations  as  the  best  means  of 
accomplishing  her  purpose,  there  are  still 
— other  things." 

"Polygamy  and  the  social  evil,"  I  con- 
ceded. 

"All  kinds  of  irregular  relations;  there 
must  be  reasons  for  them,  too." 

Perfectly  sound  ones;  most  of  them  de- 
rived from  the  unavoidable  tendency  of  so- 
cial ventures  not  in  harmony  with  the  origi- 
nal intention,  to  turn  out  to  the  lowering  of 
the  social  plane.  You  can  fool  the  Soul 
72 


LOVE    AND    THE    SOUL    MAKER 

Maker  some  of  the  time,  but  not  for  ever- 
lasting. The  chief  reason  why  polygamy 
has  been  dropped  by  the  dominant  races  is 
that  it  does  not  "work." 

From  the  point  at  which  it  becomes 
fixed  in  the  national  consciousness,  that  na- 
tion goes  forward  lamely,  like  a  man  with 
one  side  of  him  paralysed.  For  polygamy 
is  not  the  least  vicious  of  the  daughters  of 
the  dragon's  teeth.  It  followed  naturally 
on  the  decimations  of  war  and  had  the  origi- 
nal sanction  of  necessity.  It  was  bolstered 
by  the  primitive  obligation  of  women  to 
bear  and  rear  and  to  keep  on  bearing  though 
they  died  of  it.  Nature,  who  never  meant 
that  the  mother-instrument  should  go  dis- 
honoured, so  arranged  the  rhythm  of  the 
mating  impulse  that  the  function  rose  to  the 
demand  upon  it;  for  nature  is  both  exigent 
and  expedient.  It  served  its  term,  but 
even  now,  as  the  last  word  on  polygamy 
73 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

as  an  institution  is  being  said  by  the  domi- 
nant races  to  the  sons  of  the  harem,  the 
polygamous  habit,  relegated  to  a  not  too 
obtrusive  privacy,  still  lumbers  our  sexual 
evolution. 

Valda  caught  at  that.  If  we  admitted 
that  it  was  still  going  on,  though  aside  and 
in  corners,  wouldn't  it  be  on  the  whole  more 
honest  to  bring  it  out  into  the  light  and  live 
with  it  openly? 

To  which  I  might  have  replied  that  it 
was  merely  our  careless  human  habit,  first 
to  banish  the  incumbering  propensity  be- 
low stairs,  and  then  to  the  back  door  of  the 
social  establishment,  where  it  lingered  too 
long,  no  doubt,  breeding  pestilence,  before 
it  was  finally  dumped  with  the  waste  of  civ- 
ilisation. That  I  didn't  so  figure  our  pub- 
lic disapprobation  was  due  to  the  pains  I 
was  at  to  define  for  her  the  difference  be- 
tween irregularities  which  are  the  reflexes 
74 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

of  incompetent  methods  of  mating,  and 
those  which  are  reduced  under  pressure  to 
an  exchange  of  commodities.  I  meant 
completely  to  show  her  where  she  stood, 
free  from  any  stone  throwing  of  mine, 
as  one  to  whom  mate-love  had  happened 
outside  the  legal  bond,  as  it  so  pitifully 
can  happen  among  our  well  meant  misad- 
justments. 

It  wasn't  in  me  then,  or  ever,  thank 
Heaven,  to  make  for  the  secret  woman  a 
brand  and  burning  out  of  mere  secrecy,  nor 
to  heap  on  right  passion,  fretting  its  way 
through  all  our  foolish  conspiracies,  the 
stigma  of  the  furtive  indulgence.  I  had 
my  own  opinion  of  the  Reactionist,  but, 
since  I  couldn't  express  it  there  without 
making  poor  Valda  see  herself  as  the 
victim  of  worse  things  than  I  was  willing 
she  should  imagine,  it  seemed  best  to  go 
on  to  the  kind  of  thing  that  leads  periodi- 
75 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

cally  to  the  appointment  of  vice  commis- 
sioners. 

§ 

Just  as  the  nations  have  dropped  off  po- 
lygamy, so  they  are  in  the  process  of  elimi- 
nating prostitution,  not  because  it  interferes 
with  any  religious  or  traditional  taboo,  but 
on  the  plain  ground  that  it  is  hurtful  to  our 
social  health.  The  trouble  with  all  vice 
investigations  is  that  we  are  a  business  peo- 
ple. The  selling  point  is  for  most  of  us  the 
point  of  moral  departure.  We  feel  that  we 
have  measured  the  enormity  of  the  situa- 
tion when  we  know  how  many  dollars  are 
turned  over  in  the  trade  in  a  particular  pre- 
cinct. 

But  the  truth  is  that  almost  anybody  will 
sell  if  the  pinch  be  hard  enough  and 
the  price  at  hand.  And  always  there  is 
somebody  in  the  condition  of  having 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

to  sell  whether  or  no.  It  is  the  buyers 
who  proceed  solely  from  their  own  initia- 
tive. 

What,  then,  over  and  above  the  momen- 
tary gratification,  do  they  buy?  What  is 
the  consideration  which  leads  them,  when 
the  number  of  willing  and  necessitous  sell- 
ers fails,  to  seduce  and  drug  and  abduct  in 
order  that  there  may  be  more  of  such  forced 
sales  on  the  market?  Undoubtedly  the 
great  majority  of  women  who  go  down  into 
the  Pit  find  their  occasion  in  poverty,  in 
definite,  relievable  needs  of  food  and  knowl- 
edge and  entertainment;  but  the  fact  that 
violence  must  be  resorted  to  in  order  to 
keep  up  the  supply  even  in  cities,  where  the 
pinch  of  poverty  is  most  severe,  puts  eco- 
nomic pressure  out  of  the  question  as  the 
primary  cause  of  prostitution.  It  is  a  major 
factor  merely  in  determining  which  women 
shall  be  prostitutes:  the  lonely,  the  over- 
77 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 


worked,  the  starved  of  beauty  and  affection, 
the  ignorant  and  the  too  tenderly  trusting, 
they  fall  or  are  dragged  into  the  trap  of  the 
ever-gaping  demand.  And  this  demand  is 
very  simple,  I  think,  the  demand  for  sex 
relations  unaccompanied  by  moral  respon- 
sibility. 


"But  love,"  Valda  insisted  in  the  shib- 
boleth of  the  Reactionist,  "should  be  free." 

If  it  is,  nature  didn't  make  it  so.  Auto- 
matically the  act  of  loving  ties  up  with  it 
those  who  love  and  the  unborn. 

No  sooner  do  we  begin  upon  it  than  we 
enter  upon  certainties  of  affecting  the  hap- 
piness of  the  one  who  loves  with  us  and  the 
potential  third.  It  is  so  little  free  that  we 
can  neither  go  out  of  it  nor  into  it  on  the 
mere  invitation,  nor  abate  by  saying  so  one 
of  the  widening  circles  of  its  disaster. 
78 


LOVE   AND   THE   SOUL   MAKER 

Whether  for  better  or  worse,  love  is  irrev- 
ocably tied  to  its  consequences. 

The  proof  of  this  universal  conscious 
binding  up  of  moral  responsibility  with  an 
act,  is  to  be  found  in  the  universal  practise 
of  paying  something  to  get  rid  of  it.  The 
price  of  love  that  is  sold  is  a  money  indem- 
nity for  the  loyalty,  tenderness,  and  care, 
which  by  that  payment  are  acknowledged 
to  belong  naturally  with  loving. 

One  has  not  to  go  very  far  back,  no 
further  in  fact  than  the  time  when  women 
began  to  rate  their  potential  reproductive 
function  in  terms  of  maintenance,  to  find 
the  point  at  which  man  undertook  to  com- 
pound his  potential  obligation  with 
haunches  of  venison  and  strings  of  shells. 
It  is  possible  to  go  back  a  little  further 
among  tribes  where  promiscuity  is  sporadic, 
as  with  many  North  American  aborigines, 
to  discover  that  it  is  neither  incidental  nor 
79 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

economic,  but  temperamental.  Here  and 
there  an  individual  is  born  with  a  blind 
spot  for  this  particular  form  of  responsi- 
bility, as  with  tone  deafness  or  a  lack  of 
colour  discrimination.  Such  a  one  is  neither 
ostracised  nor  exempted  from  communal 
labours,  but  accepted  as  an  accidental  and 
doubtful  variant,  a  bird  with  a  speckled 
feather.  It  is  the  pressure  of  the  complex 
organisation  which  makes  of  harlotry  a  pro- 
fession. Its  real  offensiveness  is  not  in  the 
coin  that  changes  hands,  but  in  that  the  race 
is  not  served  by  it. 


If  this  were  not  so  then  there  could  be  no 
reason  why  love  should  not  be  sold  as  read- 
ily as  music  or  pictures.  The  valid  objec- 
tion to  the  Selling  Class  is  not  the  price,  but 
the  fact  that  toxines  are  generated  in  that 
80 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

class  which  poison  the  whole  body  of  so- 
ciety. In  spite  of  all  that  men  can  do  about 
it,  the  money  paid  does  not  pay;  it  merely 
scatters  and  shifts  the  accounting. 

This  being  the  case,  it  becomes  important 
to  inquire,  not  so  much  who  can  be  induced 
to  sell,  as  who  buys  and  on  what  compulsion. 


Two  classes  chiefly  resort  to  the  streets 
where  love  is  sold :  the  young  and  unmated, 
and  those  in  whom  marriage  has  failed  to 
satisfy  a  demand  felt  to  be  rational.  There 
are  also  some  preternaturally  vicious  who 
shall  be  left  where  they  belong,  with  the 
pathologist. 

The  difficulty  of  the  young  is  an  honest 
one,  arising  as  it  does  in  the  circumstance 
that  the  mating  propensity  develops  some 
years  in  advance  of  the  time  when  it  is 
thought  wise  or  desirable  to  assume  the  com- 
81 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

plex  responsibilities  of  marriage.  It  is  an 
ancient  problem  this,  appearing  as  a  matter 
of  tribal  consideration  as  early  as  the  period 
of  chipped  flint.  But  for  its  persistence  we 
have  largely  to  thank  the  extraordinary 
lumpiness  and  inchoateness  of  modern  edu- 
cation. 

With  the  best  intention  in  the  world,  we 
have  no  better  plan  than  for  youth  to  take 
all  its  book-learning  in  a  lump,  and  then 
marriage  and  the  rearing  of  a  family 
lumped  by  itself,  and,  particularly  in  the 
case  of  women,  fenced  off  from  all  other 
forms  of  experience.  Finally  only  in  mid- 
dle life  do  the  original  pair,  more  or  less 
warped  and  subdued  by  their  long  disloca- 
tion in  the  interest  of  special  functions,  be- 
come proper  members  of  society.  Thus  the 
normal  use  of  marriage  is  overbalanced  by 
its  being  made  to  assume  the  aspect  of  a 
state,  an  occasion.  Any  readjustment  which 
82 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

would  make  life  and  education  of  one  con- 
tinuous warp  and  woof  would  greatly  les- 
sen the  strain  at  this  point.  It  is  not  mar- 
riage alone,  but  all  the  primary  human 
processes  which  suffer  from  our  ranking  of 
trade  and  school  and  empire  as  enterprises 
to  live  for  rather  than  to  live  by. 

The  remedy  is  one  that  society  must  move 
determinedly  to  seek  not  only  in  educative 
processes,  but  in  readjustments  of  the  indus- 
trial system. 

"Yes?"  said  Valda. 

I  recognised  the  rising  inflection  as  one 
that  marked  her  as  a  member  of  that  group 
called,  and  perhaps  calling  themselves, 
"the  Intellectuals,"  who  out  of  sessions  of 
vast,  inchoate  talk,  draw  somehow  the  assur- 
ance that  anything  said  of  the  industrial 
system  is  said  on  their  side.  It  is  an  inflec- 
tion with  nuances  such  as  greet  the  introduc- 
tion into  the  conversation  of  a  choice  scan- 
83 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

dal,  though  I  don't  know  for  what  reason 
except  that  the  present  industrial  situation 
is,  in  view  of  our  moral  pretension,  highly 
scandalous.  My  business,  however,  is  with 
the  personal  conduct  of  male  and  female. 
I  can  tell  where  the  economic  pressure  im- 
pinges on  the  private  relation,  at  what  point 
the  struggle  for  existence  disturbs  the  bal- 
ance of  sex,  and  how  the  intention  of  the 
Soul  Maker  is  thwarted  by  stony  accretions 
of  industrial  injustice.  In  so  far  as  the  de- 
mand for  cheap,  temporary  substitutes  for 
marriage  is  the  result  of  industrial  insuffi- 
ciency, it  is  only  to  be  cured  by  the  resolu- 
tion of  the  whole  social  disorder.  But  it 
is  not  necessary  here  to  determine  anything 
of  the  method  by  which  industrial  reorgan- 
isation is  to  be  effected  except  that  it  is  a 
mistake  to  tie  up  marriage  with  it. 

The  right  to  mate  is  a  primary  human 
right.     It  encloses  in  its  contingent  possi- 
84 


LOVE   AND   THE   SOUL   MAKER 

bilities  not  only  the  seed  of  the  race  but  the 
spark  of  divinity,  beauty,  art,  altruism,  the 
knowledge  of  the  fatherliness  of  God  and 
the  imminence  of  Power.  The  family  is  a 
more  vital  human  arrangement  than  the 
factory.  The  industrial  system,  under 
whatever  name,  must  reshape  itself  plas- 
tically about  the  right  to  love  and  to  mul- 
tiply. 

The  immediate  predicament  of  society  is 
that  it  is  unable  to  provide  opportunity  for 
right  marriage  to  vast  hordes  of  men  in 
standing  armies.  The  adventurous  trades, 
mining,  bridging,  building,  are  roaring  full 
of  the  free  companies  of  industry,  homeless, 
tieless.  All  the  ways  of  work  are  clogged 
with  shoals  of  mateless  women.  All  the 
prows  of  progress  are  manned  by  fine  souls 
too  bent  upon  errands  of  the  Soul  Maker 
to  stay  for  the  wearing  complications  of  the 
usual.  Marriage,  attempting  to  stretch  it- 
85 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

self  from  point  to  point  of  this  disorder, 
parts  upon  occasions  which  begin  to  show 
too  soon  the  edges  of  decay.  Many  of  the 
phases  of  the  social  evil  are  but  so  many 
witnesses  to  inefficient  industrial  organisa- 
tion and  are  due  to  disappear  in  a  more  in- 
telligent readjustment. 

§ 

But  when  all  is  said  and  done  for  those 
who  buy  light  love  because  society  takes  no 
pains  to  afford  them  the  one  better  thing, 
we  have  still  to  deal  with  those  who  de- 
mand from  love  the  things  it  was  never 
meant  love  should  be  called  upon  to  pay. 

Chief  of  all  its  incitements  is  the  oppor- 
tunity the  street  provides  for  aptitudes  held 
over  from  the  time  when  combat  was  the 
major  process  of  living — male  vanity,  su- 
borned to  the  industrial  routine,  the  domi- 
nant attitude,  the  spirit  of  the  chase. 
86 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

Over  in  the  red  light  district,  man  is  the 
hunter,  the  mover  of  the  game.  There  he 
re-enters  the  hereditary  tract,  releases  his 
cramped  and  unexcised  barbarisms,  re- 
lives his  little  day.  And  for  a  long  time  he 
has  fondly  believed  that  the  price  he  pays 
guarantees  that  nothing  shall  come  out  of 
it  to  trouble  his  soberer  occupations.  Noth- 
ing so  disconcerts  him  as  the  light  of  mod- 
ern research  thrown  on  the  things  that,  in 
spite  of  him,  do  come  out  of  it  and  spread 
foul  traces  round  his  home. 

It  is  not  what  society  is  going  to  find  out 
about  his  favourite  pastime  that  renders 
publicity  objectionable,  but  what  he  isn't 
going  to  be  able  to  avoid  finding  out  about 
himself.  It  is  for  us  all  to  face  and  force 
into  the  social  consciousness  the  recognition 
of  the  spirit  of  the  chase  as  a  prime  factor 
in  much  that  menaces  the  love-life  of  the 
community. 

8? 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

It  goes  back,  this  demand  for  the  element 
of  sport  in  mating  encounters,  not  only  to 
the  primitive,  predatory  habit,  but  to  mar- 
riage customs  the  meanings  of  which  have 
long  been  lost  to  common  knowledge. 

Not  only  are  the  facts  of  primitive  mat- 
ings  lost  and  overlaid  by  popular  misinfor- 
mation, but  all  our  thought  about  them  has 
become  tinged  with  a  far-derived  male  pre- 
dilection. It  seems  almost  as  much  a  pity 
as  cheating  a  child  of  Santa  Claus  to  strip 
the  present-day  apostle  of  red-bludginess 
of  his  shrieking  mate  dragged  by  her  long 
tresses  to  his  lair;  but  the  truth  is  that  the 
nearerwe  get  to  bruteness  in  man  the  farther 
we  are  from  marriage  by  violence.  Not 
only  is  there  no  evidence  that  woman  in  any 
stage  showed  such  avoidance  of  her  natural 
destiny  that  the  use  of  force  became  custom- 
ary, but,  so  far  as  proof  remains  in  primitive 
rite  and  animal  behaviour,  it  is  all  to  show 
88 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

that  coquetry,  as  it  is  modernly  conceived, 
is  an  acquired  characteristic.  In  no  class  of 
warm-blooded  animals  does  the  female 
fight.  All  the  passes,  the  struttings,  the 
love-dances  of  the  bird  and  brute  world  are 
of  invitation  rather  than  opposition.  They 
have  their  rise  in  the  varying  rhythm  of  sex 
and  are  largely  determined  by  the  periodic- 
ity of  its  crises.  Not  even  the  natural  hesi- 
tancies of  the  new  and  unmeasured  experi- 
ence produce  or  imply,  in  any  species,  acts 
of  violence.  Neither  the  wild  wolf  nor  the 
roaring  lion  assaults  his  mate.  The  doe 
flees,  but  she  flees  in  a  circle;  she  surrenders 
not  to  any  struggle,  but  to  the  p recreant 
urge.  Whatever  element  of  conquest  enters 
is  between  the  opposing  males.  While  they 
rage  around  her  she  awaits  placidly  the  ap- 
proach of  the  victor. 

The  human  male,  when  he  issued  from 
animality,  added  to  the  possible  contest  with 

89 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

rivals  of  his  own  class,  the  necessity  of  win- 
ning his  bride  from  an  alien  or  hostile 
group.  Marriage  by  capture  means  the 
capture  of  the  woman  from  the  males  of  her 
own  family;  there  is  no  implication  what- 
ever of  her  being  ravished  from  herself. 
Where  no  tribal  prohibition  intervened,  the 
maid  was  still  to  be  won  from  the  chaper- 
onage  of  her  mother  and  from  customs  that 
had  all  the  force  of  a  taboo. 

It  is  scarcely  known,  or  if  known  not  esti- 
mated at  its  proper  worth,  that  tribes  still 
in  the  stone  age  of  culture  have  fine  appre- 
ciations of  the  value  of  chastity,  of  the  so- 
cial menace  of  promiscuity  and  the  expedi- 
ence of  too  early  marriage,  with  carefully 
worked  out  rituals  and  observances  for  en- 
forcing the  same.  The  ceremonies  under- 
gone by  the  aboriginal  youth  on  attaining 
majority,  which  is  usually  about  the  age  of 
fifteen,  almost  always  include  vows  of 
90 


LOVE    AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

chastity  to  be  kept  until  marriage.  In  short, 
the  social  environment  of  marriage  among 
healthy  tribes  is  built  up,  not  around  the 
idea  of  the  unwilling  and  brutishly  enforced 
bride,  but  as  a  bulwark  against  the  natural 
inclination  of  woman  toward  her  racial  ser- 
vice. 

The  element  of  contest,  where  it  enters, 
is  a  concession  to  the  idea  of  struggle  which 
became  so  early  fixed  in  the  man  mind  by 
the  clash  of  the  dominant  males.  In  the 
hairy  period  of  his  evolution,  winning  a 
bride  "off  the  old  man"  must  have  been  the 
great  adventure.  The  lover  continuing  to 
demand  the  strategic  encounter,  the  sweat 
of  combat,  the  swelling  of  victory,  demands 
them  of  woman  in  default  of  male  relatives 
who  would  rather  she'd  marry  than  not. 

I  do  not  mean  to  impute  too  much  of 
duplicity  to  the  impulse  which,  out  of  that 
divine  quality  of  givingness  so  native  to  the 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

woman  breast,  leads  her  to  supply  to  man's 
less  plastic  stuff  the  stimulating  touch.  Still 
less  is  it  implied  that  the  mere  condition  of 
womanliness  lays  one  open  to  any  solicita- 
tion. Against  the  unloved  lover  the  defence 
of  women  is  to  scuttle  and  flee  like  all  other 
defenceless,  soft-bodied  things;  and  among 
all  lovers  it  is  only  man  who  puts  femininity 
to  such  indignity.  But  once  the  mate  is 
recognised,  the  whole  course  of  her  being 
is  set  toward  surrender ;  the  need  of  trusting 
is  stronger  in  her  than  experience.  Shall 
the  indomitable  purpose  be  thwarted  by  a 
trick?  Against  nature,  however,  some 
things  experience  has  taught  her. 

The  practice  of  coquetry,  that  is  the  en- 
hancing of  the  pleasures  of  mating  by  pre- 
tended restraints,  received  its  greatest  im- 
petus during  the  barbaric  ages  when  man 
had  come  so  far  in  his  conquest  of  the  brute 
forces  that  he  could  turn  his  attention  from 
92 


them  to  the  conquest  of  his  brother  man. 
Women,  rendered  cheap  by  polygamy  and 
slavery,  must  needs  raise  themselves  out  of 
the  condition  of  drudgery  by  whatever 
available  means.  They  played,  as  slaves 
perforce  must,  on  the  susceptibilities  of  their 
masters.  What  then  should  they  play  with 
but  the  preferred  toys  and  entertainment  of 
the  time?  They  reproduced,  in  all  the  col- 
our and  harmony  of  femininity,  the  motifs 
of  the  battle  and  the  chase. 

In  those  dark  ages  of  womanhood,  wom- 
en, in  order  to  win  a  little  of  their  proper 
inheritance  of  security  and  care,  defemi- 
nised  themselves,  made,  in  the  modern  and 
so  opprobrious  term,  "men  of  themselves" — 
hunters  and  gamesters. 

The  red  light  district,  then,  is  the  last 
stand  of  the  hunted  women.  Here  they 
supply,  on  such  compulsions  as  the  indus- 
trial stupidity  of  the  period  metes  out  to 
93 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

them,  the  unsatisfying  satisfaction  of  an  ata- 
vistic appetite.  And  this  is  what  youth 
looks  on  in  the  process  that  is  euphemisti- 
cally referred  to  as  "seeing  life,"  bright  with 
dolphin  colours  of  decay.  For  the  business 
of  women  is  not  conquest  nor  pursuit,  but 
reproduction  and  conservation. 

§ 

"I  see,"  said  Valda,  after  a  long  pause, 
"it's  all  that  life  has  left  them  of  adven- 
ture." 

"All  that  business  has  left,"  I  corrected 
her.  "Business  has  been  so  predetermined 
by  the  Big  Ones  that  it  isn't  much  of  an  ad- 
venture, and  religion  isn't.  Time  was  when 
one  could  have  brave  encounters  with  saints 
and  gods  and  spirits  of  the  dead,  but  now  if 
you  venture  upon  anything  of  the  kind  you 
are  turned  over  to  the  insanity  commission, 
or  at  the  least  to  psychical  research." 
94 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

But  the  efficacy  of  passion  as  a  means  of 
accelerating  the  pulse  of  life,  is  thrust  upon 
us.  In  literature,  in  music  and  the  drama 
it  is  still  the  indispensable  adventure.  In 
middle  life,  when  natural  elasticity  begins 
to  fail,  men  reaching  out  blindly  for  the  old, 
energising  sources  fall  readily  on  the  love 
relation. 

There  is  nothing  comes  so  easily  to  hand. 
If  one  follows  it  into  a  by-path,  it  is  usually 
because  it  is  only  there  he  can  follow  it 
without  disturbing  the  peace  of  lives  long 
linked  with  his.  He  of  necessity  buys  off 
the  moral  responsibility  because  he  has  al- 
ready all  of  that  commodity  he  can  well 
carry.  There  is  many  a  pitcher  of  respec- 
tability goes  full  of  stolen  waters. 

I  had  to  put  out  my  hand  over  Valda's 
locked  fingers  to  still  the  rising  exclama- 
tion which  failed  to  discriminate  between 
a  perfectly  good  excuse  for  doing  a  thing 
95 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

and  the  thing  being  good  for  us  when  it  is 
done. 

Probably  the  number  of  those  who  buy 
love  because  they  can  imagine  nothing  bet- 
ter for  themselves  is  not  so  great  as  the  num- 
ber of  those  who  could  get  nothing  better  in 
any  case.  What  gives  us  the  right  to  inter- 
fere is  the  final  outcome  to  society. 

It  is  against  these  two  classes,  those  who 
for  social  or  industrial  reasons  are  unable 
to  mate  properly,  and  those  who,  mated  or 
not,  must  still  indulge  a  vestigial  propen- 
sity, that  any  proposition  for  the  cure  of  the 
social  evil  must  be  directed.  It  will  be  a 
great  gain  to  know  that  no  woman  must  sell 
herself  for  bare  sustenance,  but  it  is  impor- 
tant to  remember  that  so  long  as  the  demand 
exists  there  will  be  some^  kind  of  price 
found  at  which  somebody  will  surrender. 
That  society  will  in  time  dispose  of  the  buy- 
ing and  selling  of  love  just  as  it  has  rid  it- 
96 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

self  of  chattel  slavery  I  see  no  reason  to 
doubt.  It  will  have  more  leisure  then  to 
deal  with  a  growing  class  who  take  love 
without  paying  anything. 

§ 

Within  the  last  quarter  century  we  have 
come  clearly  to  recognise  and  define  a  type 
of  industrial  parasite  who  taps  the  veins  of 
profit  without  accounting  or  return,  as  the 
money  grafter.  More  vicious  and  insidious 
even  is  the  as  yet  untabulated  love  pirate, 
the  grafter  in  the  precious  stuff  of  person- 
ality. There  is  a  tendency  always  in  the 
more  sophisticated  states  to  make  of  the 
finer  phases  of  human  intercourse  an 
achievement  and  an  end,  and  this  is  the  be- 
ginning of  desuetude. 

But  when  they  go  further  and  make  of 
love  a  mere  enhancement  of  the  passing 
time,  there  ensues  a  condition  compared  to 
97 


LOVE    AND    THE    SOUL    MAKER 

which  the  paid  traffic  of  the  street  is  an  ob- 
vious and  remediable  evil.  For  this  sort  of 
love  goes  masquerading  in  the  most  endear- 
ing of  the  lighter  phrases,  the  chiffons,  one 
might  say,  of  grand  passion.  It  assumes  the 
bearing  of  a  superior  freedom.  Its  tech- 
nique is  admirable.  And  it  does  not  pay 
anything. 

To  the  love  grafters  money  is  as  offen- 
sive a  price  as  children  or  loyalty  or  long 
suffering.  Love — what  is  called  love — for 
them  exists  at  its  perf  ectness  only  when  most 
detached  from  all  possible  occasions  for 
affecting  anything;  the  more  sterile,  the 
more  desirable.  Love  for  love's  sake  is  the 
shibboleth  by  which  they  blunt  the  unas- 
sailable fact  that  love  was  not  invented  for 
love's  sake  but  for  life's.  They — one  must 
continue  with  the  inclusive  pronoun  because 
pirating  of  this  sort  is  as  likely  to  be  an  of- 
fence of  one  sex  as  the  other — count  that 
98 


LOVE    AND    THE    SOUL    MAKER 

venture  most  successful  which  achieves  the 
most  complete  inutility.  This,  by  the  very 
nature  of  love,  being  a  doubtful  perform- 
ance, the  love  pirate  preys  usually  on  the 
wives  of  his  neighbours  or  upon  the  young, 
on  anybody  not  in  a  position  to  enforce 
against  him  the  logical  consequences  of  the 
relation.  He  arrives  at  the  effect  of  there 
being  no  consequences  by  being  able  to  ig- 
nore them. 

This  kind  of  grafting  is  beyond  the  juris- 
diction of  the  police,  but  it  marks  the  qual- 
ity of  the  practitioner  as  descriptively  as  a 
rating  in  Bradstreet's.  For,  when  not  actu- 
ally the  evidence  of  arrested  development, 
this  refined  sort  of  promiscuity  is  the  result 
of  poverty  of  the  imagination  and  spiritual 
indolence.  Such  as  these  love  love  so  long 
as  it  is  easy;  in  short  they  are  of  the  stripe 
of  the  lovers  of  "easy  money."  Their  mat- 
ing is  after  the  manner  of  those  savages  who 
99 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

can  count  to  five,  but  for  a  larger  number 
can  only  count  to  five  again  on  the  other  set 
of  fingers. 

Having  counted  the  opening  moves  of  in- 
vitation, chase  and  surrender,  they  begin 
again  with  a  new  set  of  pawns  the  same  in- 
fantile progressions,  never  aware  that  the 
real  value  of  mate-love,  the  determining  ex- 
perience, lies  just  beyond  the  point  of  ar- 
rested development.  For  the  best  love  is 
not  given  away;  it  is  the  purchase  of  self- 
abnegation. 

§ 

The  moon  was  going  down  behind  the 
pines,  cold  and  jewel  bright  In  the  deep 
shadow  of  the  hill  in  which  the  house  was 
engulfed  I  could  hear  Valda  crying.  She 
had  found,  I  knew,  the  answer  to  all  her 
questionings,  the  secret  woe  of  abandoned 
women;  an  answer  so  world-old  that  if  men 
100 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

had  stopped  to  hear  it — but  that  sort  of  men 
do  not  stop,  they  find  grief  of  such  propor- 
tions indelicate. 

"He  never  paid!"  she  said;  the  knowl- 
edge welled  up  in  her  rendingly.  He  had 
never  paid  to  her  sincerity  the  tribute  of 
faith  or  loyalty  or  understanding.  She  had 
clung  to  him  at  first,  to  draw  him  back  to 
the  one  self-forgetting  act  which  should 
have  marked  his  knowledge  of  her  love  as  a 
thing  higher  than  his  pleasure.  And  he 
had  not  come  back.  She  was  torn  now  by 
realising  that  light  love  is  light  because 
it  has  no  such  knowledge.  For  Valda 
is  a  good  woman,  and,  under  whatever 
social  misadventure,  good  women  are  dis- 
tinguishable from  bad  by  just  this  ca- 
pacity for  knowing  that  the  proper  end 
of  loving  is  not  personal  but  racial;  it  is 
the  Soul  Maker's  most  precious  com- 
modity. 

101 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

What  she  cried  for  there  in  the  dark  was 
/   not  the  loss  of  her  lover,  but  of  that  obla- 
tion which  should  be  paid  to  love 
altar. 


as  on  an 


IT  was  not  until  two  or  three  days  later 
that  we  came  to  the  question  of  mar- 
riage, one  of  those  full-leaved  sum- 
mer afternoons  so  crowded  with  green 
growth  that  there  was  no  room  in  it  even  for 
Valda's  pain.  We  had  come  down  from  the 
house  to  the  old  stone  bridge  and  sat  watch- 
ing the  water  slip  by  us  as  mindlessly  as  the 
flight  of  time.  On  every  side  the  leaves  of 
the  rock  maples  lapped  over  smoothly  like 
plumage  on  a  breast,  and  the  limpid  creek 
took  on  green  reflections  between  the  leop- 
ard-coloured stones.  We  had  talked  during 
the  morning  altogether  of  other  things,  for 
which  reason  it  seemed  inevitable  that  in 
the  first  full  pause  we  should  revert  to  the 
103 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

matter  which  lay  closest  to  our  minds  with- 
out other  introduction. 

"Why  is  it,"  Valda  wished  to  know, 
"when  there  are  so  many  evidences  in  fa- 
vour of  marriage  as  we  practise  it,  so  many 
marriages  fall  short  of  just  the  purpose  they 
seem  meant  to  serve?" 

It  was  necessary  for  me  to  remind  her 
that  I  hadn't  said  that  the  evidence  was  in 
favour  of  marriage  altogether  as  we  prac- 
tise it. 

All  I  had  claimed  was  the  sanction  of  the 
Soul  Maker  for  permanent,  exclusive  mat- 
ings;  which  is  not  saying  that  the  purpose 
of  marriage  might  not  be  thwarted  by  the 
decorations  and  conventions  which  we  at- 
tach to  the  condition  of  being  married.  I 
would  even  go  so  far  as  to  premise  that  the 
initial  mistake  about  marriage  is  in  regard- 
ing it  as  a  condition,  a  state,  when  it  is  pri- 
marily a  relation.  Stripped  to  its  essentials, 
104 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

marriage  is  an  agreement  between  any  pair 
to  practise  mate-love  toward  one  another, 

• __ _ „,-.— .— ~  i  /  f\jy\. 

with  intention.    A  vast  amount  of  our  mod- 

\    1  -      _£.          r/' 

ern  marriage  custom  is  as  extraneous  to  this 
as  is  that  temple  in  India  to  the  hair  of  the 
prophet's  beard  which  it  enshrines. 

There  is  undoubtedly  such  a  thing  as  race 
hypnosis — a  state  of  mind  induced  by  the 
recurrence  of  certain  incidentally  associ- 
ated acts,  until  it  becomes  impossible  to 
think  of  one  without  the  other.  It  has  hap- 
pened with  mate-love  that,  being  more  con- 
veniently practised  under  certain  conditions, 
and  the  children  better  taken  care  of  under 
other  particular  arrangements,  these  have 
so  grown  together  in  the  general  mind  as  to 
take  on  the  authority  of  moral  precedent. 
It  is  the  sum  of  these  conveniences  which 
makes  up  the  mode  of  marriage  in  any  coun- 
try. Sometimes  they  are  organised  about 
essential  values,  but  quite  as  often  they  are 
105 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

reflections  of  the  current  religion  or  the  mis- 
apprehension of  natural  facts  peculiar  to 
the  country  which  produced  them.  Their 
extraneous  character  is  shown  by  the  cir- 
cumstance that,  viewed  over  a  great  space  of 
history,  they  are  seen  to  change,  and  to 
change  in  such  degree  that  what  was  at  one 
time  the  imperative  duty  or  privilege  of  one 
sex  in  marriage  becomes,  in  the  course  of 
several  thousand  years,  the  privilege  and 
obligation  of  the  other. 

The  average  view,  however,  does  not 
include  anything  like  even  one  thousand 
years.  It  is  centred  on  the  generation  at 
hand,  with  a  tolerant  survey  of  the  one  just 
past  and  an  apprehensive  and  often  repre- 
hensive  glimpse  of  the  generation  coming. 
And  behind  it  all  is  the  reiterative  stroke  on 
stroke  of  centuries  of  associative  practice, 
biassing  the  mind.  It  is  small  wonder,  then, 
that  the  mode  in  which  marriage  has  been 
1 06 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

carried  on  should  become  so  identified  with 
the  essential  process  of  mate-love  that  it  is 
sometimes  easier  to  dissolve  the  marriage 
than  to  learn  to  conduct  it  in  a  new  fashion. 
For  it  will  be  seen  on  very  little  examina- 
tion that  many  people  who  are  unhappy 
within  marriage  are  so,  not  from  any  viola- 
tion of  its  primary  requirements,  but  be- 
cause one  or  the  other  of  them  has  believed 
that  some  long-established  mode,  say  of 
housewifery  in  the  woman  or  money-making 
in  the  man,  is  a  part  of  the  divine  ordinance. 


§! 


We  shall  get  nowhere  with  the  discussion 
of  marriage  without  a  clear  distinction  be- 
tween the  things  inherent  in  the  relation, 
and  those  which  from  time  to  time  have 
proved  convenient  to  it.  It  might  even  pay 
to  overdo  the  matter  of  distinction  if  it 
107 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

would  save  either  member  of  a  married  pair 
from  foisting  personal  preferences  on  the 
other  in  the  name  of  the  eternal  verities. 

"But  marriage  is  so  personal,"  Valda  be- 
gan to  say. 

About  as  personal  as  getting  a  living  or 
an  education.  Love,  quite  as  much  after 
marriage  as  before  it,  has  its  own  way  with 
us.  It  is  no  more  possible  to  be  married  all 
to  oneself  than  it  is  to  go  to  school  that  way. 
At  every  turn  we  are  overshadowed  by  the 
racial  experience.  And,  since  love  does  not 
always  sing  in  the  ecstatic  key,  it  is  impor- 
tant in  moments  of  dryness  and  doubt  to  be 
able  to  turn  with  certainty  to  the  profound- 
est  moods  and  interpretations  which  such 
experience  has  revealed  to  us.  The  attempt 
to  derive  the  authority  for  marriage  modes 
from  revealed  religion  has  blinded  the  gen- 
eral intelligence  to  their  natural  derivation 
from  experimentation. 
108 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

Under  all  the  stupidities  of  civilisation 
there  is  still  operative  in  man  an  instinct  as 
self -preservative  as  the  movement  of  the 
natural  animal  to  reject  unsuitable  food. 
By  study,  all  forms  and  modes  of  marriage 
are  seen  to  resolve  themselves  into  the  work- 
ing of  this  instinct  to  prevent  the  too  early 
withering  of  mate-love  before  its  purpose 
is  accomplished.  The  impulse  which  re- 
jects the  word  "obey"  from  the  marriage 
service  is  one  with  the  impulse  which  re- 
tains "honour  and  cherish."  What  it  means  is 
simply  that  we  have  discovered  that  obedi- 
ence has  nothing  to  do  with  the  permanence 
of  love,  but  that  no  set  of  experiments  has 
revealed  a  way  to  keep  it  alive  and  alight 
without  honour  and  cherishing.  Whether 
its  ultimate  purpose  be  to  rear  children  or 
to  enrich  the  race  by  raising  the  plane  of 
personal  achievement,  so  long  as  there  re- 
mains anything  of  that  purpose  unaccom- 
109 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

plished,  the  primary  obligation  of  lovers  is 
to  love.  It  is  around  this  working  necessity 
that  the  duties  and  proprieties  of  marriage 
are  centred,  from  it  they  take  their  sole 
extenuation  or  compulsion.  To  love  and  to 
keep  on  loving.  This  is  the  one  way  of  mak- 
ing marriage  do  its  work  in  the  world.  Any 
call  for  reorganisation  of  the  fashion  of  liv- 
ing together,  such  as  arise  from  time  to  time 
in  our  changing  social  environment,  must 
conform  itself  to  this  necessity.  It  must  de- 
rive its  authority  not  from  any  pre-existing 
code  of  ethics  or  religion,  but  from  its  ca- 
pacity to  nourish  the  eternal  need  of  each 
for  the  other. 


Confronted  with  any  of  the  surprises  of 

the  modern  feminist  movement,  it  has  been 

a    perfectly    legitimate    question    to    ask 

whether  or  not,  under  heretofore  unexperi- 

no 


enced  conditions,  men  and  women  will  con- 
tinue to  love  one  another.  It  is  so  important 
that  they  should  go  on  doing  so  that  we  may 
be  forgiven  for  failing  to  see  on  all  occasions 
that  it  is  also  important  that  they  should  do 
so  without  capitulation.  It  has  taken  a  cen- 
tury of  hesitancies  and  flutters  to  arrive  at 
the  sane  conclusion  that  human  rights  of 
self-development  and  social  service  are 
aids  to  successful  marriage  rather  than 
infringements  of  it.  But  we  have  not 
yet  rid  ourselves  of  the  particular  blind 
spot  which  made  such  long  confusion 
possible:  we  are  still  attempting  to  estab- 
lish the  spiritual  values  of  marriage  on 
the  testimony  of  a  highly  specialised  mi- 
nority. 

I  do  not  refer  now  to  the  poets  who  have 

written  of  love  with  a  temperamental  bias ; 

to  learned  men  with  a  no  less  pernicious 

bias  of  sapless  intellectuality;  churchmen 

in 


LOVE    AND    THE    SOUL    MAKER 

with  a  bias  fixed  by  a  long  antedated  revela- 
tion ;  nor  yet  to  the  women  who  have  writ- 
ten of  it  with  one  eye  aslant  to  see  what  men 
will  think  of  them ;  nor  to  the  great  prophets 
of  sex  who  have  arisen  in  this  later  day, 
whom  we  still  wait  for  time  to  confirm  to 
us.  I  refer  to  the  patent  fact  that  most  of 
the  material  from  which  we  build  an  ideal 
of  marriage  values,  comes  from,  or  is  di- 
rected toward,  that  class  of  whom  the  Lady 
of  the  House  is  the  accepted  type.  Our  ex- 
pressed judgment  is  largely  conditioned,  in 
respect  to  the  particular  mode,  by  its 
relevance  to  the  type  rather  than  to  a  racial 
use.  The  excellent,  club-fed  male,  whose 
personal  equation  is  rated  by  his  competi- 
tiveness, educated  at  universities  where  no- 
body ever  learns  any  of  the  things  one  needs 
to  know  about  the  important  functions  of 
husbanding  and  fathering,  has  developed 
the  Lady  of  the  House  under  a  system  which 
112 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

involves  the  suppression  of  her  most  prized 
attributes  in  some  others  of  her  species, 
without  being  able  at  the  same  time  to  ad- 
duce any  evidence  of  her  being  the  pre- 
ferred racial  instrument. 

For  the  most  notable  characteristic  of 
this  type,  the  species  mark,  is  its  failure  to 
maintain  itself  in  the  face  of  any  reasonable 
labour  to  live.  All  the  modes  of  her  lady- 
hood are  in  the  nature  of  a  performance,  a 
triumph  of  technique  rather  than  an  ex- 
pression of  reality.  In  the  absence  of  the 
protecting  mate,  or  of  a  plenitude  of  less 
cherished  members  of  her  own  sex  to  as- 
sume the  drudgery  of  her  state,  the  Lady  of 
the  House  is  quickly  reabsorbed  into  the 
tribe  of  women.  But  no  type  can  be  of  value 
for  founding  a  racial  procedure  which  can 
not  survive  that  prime  necessity  of  making 
a  living. 

There  might  be  more  excuse  for  our  con- 
"3 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

tinuing  to  derive  our  notions  of  ideal  mar- 
riage from  the  numerically  small  group,  di- 
vided by  every  issue  of  their  lives  from  the 
working  majority,  if  it  could  be  shown  that 
the  experimental  values  of  marriage,  those 
which  are  concerned  with  holding  the  pair 
together,  were  unfavourably  affected  by  rea- 
sonable labour.  We  vex  our  time  to  think 
out  the  proper  relation  of  the  sexes  when 
the  answers  to  most  of  the  questions  we  ask 
ourselves  lie  all  about  us  in  the  daily  lives 
of  the  voiceless  companies  exiled  by  trade 
from  green  fields  and  the  sun.  We  find 
marriage  proceeding  there  to  its  unalterable 
purpose  in  direct  contradiction  to  the  most 
cherished  modes  of  the  ideal  mongering 
classes.  Millions  of  self-supporting  women 
are  deeply  loved ;  women  working  "outside 
the  home,"  the  anathema  of  the  Lady  of  the 
House,  have  been  fought  for;  and  women 
not  at  all  becomingly  gowned  and  not  al- 
114 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

ways  immaculately  clean,  have  inspired  life- 
long devotions. 

The  question  as  to  what  men  and  women 
may  do  to  be  loved  is  largely  a  class  ques- 
tion, and  invalid  without  the  indicator  of 
the  class  thought  desirable  to  be  loved  by. 
Not  only  does  the  Soul  Maker  appear  to 
derive  no  advantage  from  the  millinery  of 
marriage,  but  it  is  even  possible  that  the 
splitting  up  of  the  initial  racial  impulse  into 
an  infinitude  of  subtleties  is  in  itself  the  evi- 
dence of  something  lost  which  may  be  re- 
covered by  a  study  of  marriage  under  con- 
ditions in  which  the  values  are  still  factual. 


Valda  was  sufficiently  subdued.     "You 
mean,"  she  ventured,  "that  we  think  too 
much  of  what  we  feel,  and  think  it  impor- 
tant because  we  feel  it?" 
"5 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

But  I  meant  a  little  more  than  that 
in  fact;  not  only  the  modes  but  many 
of  the  emotions  which  in  our  social 
group  have  gathered  about  marriage,  are 
associative  rather  than  generic.  They 
borrow  too  much  from  the  setting,  they 
shine  by  the  reflected  light  of  art  and  litera- 
ture. 

The  natural  result  of  a  highly  spiritu- 
alised ideal  of  mate-love  is  an  attempt  to 
make  it  do  too  much  for  us,  to  answer  for 
too  many  things.  Women  are  the  worst 
offenders  in  this.  Passion  must  be  not  only 
pure  air  and  fire  to  them,  but  bread  and 
meat;  it  must  be  enforced  to  do  the  work 
of  religion  in  raising  the  spiritual  plane, 
and  manifest  itself  in  all  the  many  facetted 
culture  of  the  time.  There  are  women  who 
think  themselves  unsuitably  mated  if  the 
note  to  which  they  are  raised  by  a  picture 
or  an  opera  does  not  tune  with  the  domi- 
116 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

nant  key  of  their  relation  to  their  husbands, 
and  they  blame,  not  themselves  nor  the  pic- 
ture, but  the  husband. 

If  one  wants  conviction  on  this  point  one 
has  only  to  examine  the  so-called  ladies' 
journals  for  the  quality  of  advice,  instruc- 
tion, and  consolation  offered  to  the  married, 
to  realise  that,  however  much  they  may 
have  laid  hold  of  individuality,  there  is  lit- 
tle passing  current  in  that  class  which  could 
withstand  for  a  day  the  assaults  of  reality. 
In  spite  of  a  few  notable  instances  where 
the  life  of  the  lover  has  been  keyed  to  the 
very  highest  pitch  of  personal  passion,  there 
is  no  evidence  that  the  attempt  to  colour 
the  whole  of  existence  with  the  consummat- 
ing movement  of  right  love  results  in  any- 
thing but  spreading  it  thinner. 

What  we  really  need  to  know  about  it  is 
not  the  power  to  which  mate-love  may  be 
raised  when  played  upon  by  all  the  ex- 
117 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

ponents  of  modern  culture,  but  the  sum  of 
its  common  factors. 


It  is  not  only  the  fallibility  of  women  to 
attempt  to  make  love  fill  out  the  whole 
round  of  life  for  them,  but  they  go  further 
and  undertake,  not  without  excuse  in  the 
social  compulsion  which  robs  them  of  other 
forms  of  activity,  to  make  of  marriage  a 
career.  They  try  to  find  in  it  a  substitute 
for  something  to  do,  for  all  the  varied  pos- 
sibilities to  which  they  in  common  with 
their  brothers  are  born,  which  smoulder 
and  ache  in  them  and  breed  dizzying 
vapours.  All  doors  but  marriage  being 
closed  to  women  for  attaining  eminence, 
social  position,  fortune,  human  contacts, 
they  demand  it  all  of  marriage,  and  by  the 
evidence  of  the  divorce  court,  marriage  is 
breaking  down  under  the  strain. 
118 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

Now  that  housewifery,  with  all  its  more 
important  functions  performed  outside  the 
home  in  factories  and  food  shops,  leaves  the 
intelligence  so  largely  disengaged,  the  dis- 
covery of  the  insufficiency  of  marriage  as  a 
determining  condition  has  rushed  upon  us. 
Unions  in  which  the  relation  has  proved 
entirely  competent  for  the  primary  purpose 
of  loving  and  rearing  children,  fail  miser- 
ably before  the  necessity  of  satisfying  all 
the  hungry  human  demands  of  women. 
Comes  now  the  steadying  moment  when  we 
begin  to  wonder  if  it  were  not  wiser  to  re- 
lieve the  strain  upon  marriage  than  so 
lightly  to  dissolve  it.  The  necessity  under 
which  the  industrial  system  finds  itself  of 
ta&ng  account  of  the  woman  needs  of  fe- 
male workers  has  reacted  upon  our  attitude 
toward  the  human  needs  of  women.  We 
begin  to  perceive  that  marriage  has  to  do 
chiefly  with  sex,  and  that  sex  is  only  one  of 
119 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

the  departments  of  life  and  not — no,  not 
even  for  women — the  whole  of  it. 

"But  the  question  of  maintenance," 
Valda  began 

— Is  primarily  a  problem  of  economics 
rather  than  of  sex.  It  is  derived  from  the  in- 
dustrial situation  rather  than  from  any- 
thing inherent  in  the  relations  of  men  and 
women.  "Maintenance"  is  a  term  very 
loosely  used  to  imply  the  right  of  a  woman 
to  demand  that  her  husband  should  per- 
form all  labours  outside  the  home  which  are 
involved  in  the  business  of  raising  a  family. 
It  by  no  means  indicates  that  she  is  to  be  re- 
lieved of  indoor  labours  no  matter  how  ar- 
duous they  may  be.  It  does  not  carry  with 
it  the  right  to  be  maintained  in  the  event  of 
the  husband's  failure  or  death,  nor  does  it 
even  imply  any  standard. 

Interpretations  of  the  term  are  local  and 
periodic;  they  are  even  narrower,  and  be- 
120 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

come  the  mere  shibboleths  of  a  class.  The 
whole  idea  of  maintenance  takes  validity 
from  the  potential  maternity  of  the  wife, 
for  only  when  incapacitated  by  the  bearing 
or  rearing  of  children  is  the  wife  logically 
entitled  to  be  "supported."  The  advisa- 
bility of  extending  this  support  over  the 
whole  of  the  woman's  life  rests  on  its  ulti- 
mate effect  on  her  child-bearing  capacity,  a 
point  upon  which  students  of  economics 
disagree.  The  only  circumstance  which 
would  render  maintenance  a  marriage 
"right"  would  be  the  existence  of  a  social 
system  which  made  self-supporting  work 
by  women  improper  or  impossibly  difficult. 
In  so  far  as  men  have  committed  themselves 
to  these  two  absurdities,  they  are  bound  to 
accept  as  legitimate  the  demand  of  women 
to  be  kept  in  idleness.  The  recent  move- 
ment toward  state  aid  for  penniless  mothers 
is  evidence  of  a  growing  public  conviction 

121 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

that  maintenance  is  not  so  much  a  right  as 
a  compensation  for  services  performed. 
But  the  fact  is  that  the  number  of  women 
who  are  exclusively  "maintained"  without 
the  necessity  of  hard  and  exacting  work  of 
some  kind,  is  inconsiderable.  Here  in 
America  it  has  always  been  an  ideal  rather 
than  an  accomplished  state  of  things.  For 
the  preferred  mode  of  marriage  still  shapes 
itself  about  the  old  feudal  ideal  of  the  lord 
of  the  house  and  the  lady  chatelaine,  the 
armoured,  valiant  male  going  forth  to  the 
daily  battle  of  trade,  and  returning  with 
his  spoils  to  refresh  himself  in  the  presence 
I  of  the  mother-priestess  who  performs 
in  his  absence  the  daily  miracle  of  look- 
ing well  to  her  household  and  still  pre- 
serving herself  in  a  state  of  smudgeless 
charm. 

It  is  the  ideal  of  a  numerically  small  but 
important  group,  important  enough  to  have 
122 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

put  it  into  poetry  and  picture  and  song, 
where  it  remains  still  in  all  its  false  and  al- 
luring perspectives.  For  the  one  thing  that 
the  picture  fails  to  present  to  us  is  the  fact 
that  never  could  it  have  so  much  as  shaped 
itself  as  an  ideal  in  the  racial  imagination, 
except  under  conditions  which  precluded 
the  possibility  of  its  being  attainable  by 
more  than  the  few  who  showed  it  forth. 
The  ideal  of  the  mistress-wife  and  mother- 
priestess  is  indissolubly  associated  with  the 
idea  of  a  serving  class.  Never  at  any  time 
in  the  world's  history  has  this  ideal  existed 
except  upon  a  background  of  retainers, 
slaves,  serfs,  servants,  concubines,  captives, 
or  other  dependents  who  by  the  condition 
of  such  service  were  forever  precluded 
from  enjoying  on  their  own  account  the 
state  which  they  existed  to  maintain.  The 
very  word  family  was  originally  a  descrip- 
tive term  to  include  not  only  those  born  in 
123 


LOVE    AND    THE    SOUL    MAKER 

the  household  but  bound  into  it  by  hire  or 
purchase. 

Never  since  man  emerged  from  the  tribal 
state  has  the  whole  work  of  feeding  and 
comforting  and  rearing  the  children  been 
done  by  the  house  mother  in  the  better  con- 
ditioned families.  What  we  mean  in  fact 
by  better  conditioned  and  "best"  families  is 
just  those  families  in  which  all  the  work  has 
not  to  be  done  by  the  chatelaine.  The 
struggle  of  every  man  in  a  democracy  to  ob- 
tain these  conditions  for  his  own  wife  and 
children  has  resulted  in  the  work  which  was 
formerly  done  by  dependents  within  the 
household  being  now  done  by  specialists 
outside  it.  During  the  last  three  centuries 
the  modal  history  of  marriage  has  been  the 
history  of  the  gradual  emergence  of  the 
serving  class  into  the  class  of  householders. 
Yet  here  in  America,  come  up  from  varied 
parentage,  with  clashing  traditions,  by  sys- 
124 


LOVE    AND    THE    SOUL    MAKER 

terns  of  education  waveringly  aimed  at  the 
ascending  scale  of  living,  we  are  still  stu- 
pidly trying  to  pour  all  this  unlikely  ma- 
terial into  a  mould  which  met  its  determin- 
ing circumstance  long  before  the  rise  of 
democracy.  Everywhere  we  see  married 
pairs  attempting  to  organise  a  home  about 
some  tattered  remnant  of  the  old  ideal  and 
rending  one  another  because  they  fail  at  it. 


It  is  not  alone  by  antedating  our  marriage 
modes  by  some  centuries  that  we  come  to 
misadventure,  but  quite  as  much  because 
all  our  modes  are  coloured  by  the  two  most 
mischievous  of  social  misapprehensions. 
These  are  that  the  worth  of  a  man  is  deter- 
mined by  the  goods  he  can  get  together,  and 
the  worth  of  a  woman  by  what  she  can  in- 
duce men  to  feel  about  her.  All  our  sex 
values  are  tinged  by  this  last  just  as  all  our 
125 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

material  values  take  colour  from  the  first. 
Unconsciously,  perhaps,  but  none  the  less 
surely,  the  selective  principle  derived  from 
it  is  at  work,  overlaying  the  racial  instinct 
with  secondary  considerations. 

When  women  chose  the  best  food-getters 
because  they  were  irresistibly  attracted  to- 
ward the  qualities  of  initiative,  readiness, 
and  skill  which  distinguished  them  among 
the  tribesmen,  then  they  worked  with  the 
Soul  Maker.  But  when  the  choice  of  men 
with  dollars  is  made  only  after  overcoming 
by  an  effort  the  repugnance  occasioned  by 
traits  which  make  the  accumulation  of  dol- 
lars possible,  there  is  evident  a  racial  back- 
sliding. Beauty  was  a  bright  beacon  in  the 
hands  of  the  Great  Experimenter,  for  it  led 
the  desire  of  youth  to  the  fittest  numbers; 
but  beauty  cultivated  as  a  lure  and  sought 
for  the  effect  it  produces,  is  the  undoing  of 
both  those  who  draw  and  are  drawn  by  it. 
126 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

So  long,  however,  as  the  things  a  woman 
may  do  for  her  children  are  dependent 
wholly  on  the  earning  capacity  of  their 
father,  women  must  choose  money-getting 
mates,  for  women  choose  not  only  for  them- 
selves but  for  their  offspring.  This  is  the 
serious  predicament  into  which  society  has 
got  itself.  For  the  betterment  of  the  spe- 
cies it  must  either  contrive  that  the  wealth 
of  the  world  shall  fall  into  the  hands  of 
those  best  fitted  for  propagation,  or  the  re- 
sponsibility for  the  upbringing  of  the  young 
must  pass  from  the  hands  of  the  individual 
parent  to  society  at  large.  Marriage  can- 
not find  its  way  alone  out  of  this  coil;  nor 
is  it  for  the  exponents  of  any  particular 
form  of  marriage  to  offer  the  determining 
vote.  The  failure  of  all  institutional  sub- 
stitutes for  personal  parental  care,  as  well 
as  the  known  reactionary  effect  of  personal 
responsibility  upon  character  and  mentality, 
127 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 
would  seem  to  point  away  from  the  assump- 

y 

tion  of  that  responsibility  by  the  state.  The 
original  intention  of  mate-love  itself,  with 
its  implication  of  permanence,  does  more 
than  imply  the  purpose  of  the  Soul  Maker. 
It  seems  to  say,  by  its  effort  to  hold  the  con- 
sanguineous group  together,  that  there  is 
something  to  be  gotten  out  of  that  binding- 
up  of  interests  that  is  not  collectible  from 
the  social  group,  something  that  in  too  easy 
a  dissolution  of  the  natural  bond  will  be 
regrettably  missed. 

§ 


However  it  may  finally  be  resolved,  this 
disposition  to  estimate  men  by  the  amount 
of  their  property  is  the  vermiform  appen- 
dix of  our  social  judgment.  Originating  in 
a  time  when  getting  was  the  sole  criterion 
of  fitness  to  survive,  it  has  become  the  seat 
of  many  active  disorders,  most  pernicious 
128 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL    MAKER 

of  which  is  the  reversion  of  the  Soul 
Maker's  appraisement  of  women.  For 
women,  so  early  as  they  became  property 
in  any  degree,  were  chosen  to  serve  the  im- 
mediate interests  of  their  proprietors — that 
is  to  say,  their  greeds,  passions,  and  preju- 
dices, rather  than  the  uses  of  society. 

It  is  along  the  line  of  this  misapprehen- 
sion as  to  the  true  values  of  femininity  that 
we  are  inducted  into  the  most  pitiable  of  all 
mating  follies — I  mean  the  folly  of  made 
love. 

Loving  is  so  natural  that,  given  a  free  so- 
cial interplay  of  the  sexes,  it  will  Spring  up 
as  wholesomely  as  grass  under  rain.  Under 
the  restrictions  of  civilisation  the  need  of 
loving  tends  to  satisfy  itself,  out  of  whatever 
meagre  and  incompetent  material  is  offered, 
by  the  creation  of  illusion. 

Added  to  the  narrow  social  life  which 
poverty,  class  prejudice  or  the  accidents  of 
129 


LOVE    AND   THE    SOUL    MAKER 

environment  force  upon  us,  is  the  terrible 
necessity  to  marry  somehow,  anyhow,  but 
still  to  marry,  which  is  laid  on  women  by 
the  perversion  of  feminine  values.  De- 
prived of  free  association  with  those  whom 
they  might  naturally  love  or  be  loved  by, 
young  people,  incited  by  desire,  by  the  mat- 
ing propensity,  with  the  aid  of  fiction  and 
the  poets,  will  build  up  out  of  the  most  in- 
apposite material  a  kind  of  stage  effect  of 
love,  which  too  often  reveals  its  staginess 
only  to  the  later  high  lights  of  marriage. 

The  mischief  of  made  love  is  not  alto- 
gether its  theatrical  character — all  love- 
making  is  along  the  line  of  self-dramatisa- 
tion— but  the  fact  that  it  is  sprung  from  that 
subornation  of  the  mating  practice  brought 
about  by  the  servitude  of  women. 

In  the  beginning  the  female  waited  in 
placidity  while  the  males  brandished  their 
antlers,  displayed  their  brilliant  plumage 
130 


LOVE    AND    THE    SOUL    MAKER 

about  her.  She  chose  not  who  vanquished 
her,  but  who  showed  himself  the  superior 
of  his  fellows.  If  she  entered  the  game  at 
all  it  was  merely  to  provide  them  an  occa- 
sion to  make  show  of  admirable  qualities. 
But  women,  made  plentiful  by  war,  cheap- 
ened, to  secure  their  mating  rights  plotted 
and  inveigled.  They  played,  but  they  could 
not  play  with  realities.  For  the  virtue  of 
woman  is  secret;  it  manifests  in  long-suffer- 
ing, in  patience  and  foresightedness,  in 
chastity  and  kindness,  in  the  wide  hip  and 
the  flowing  breast;  it  was  meant  for  service, 
not  for  showing:  Women  when  they  court 
can  adduce  no  evidence  of  their  racial  fit- 
ness; to  do  so  is  to  show  themselves  unfit. 
The  most  they  can  do  is  to  make  themselves 
desirable,  and  withhold  gratification  until 
they  have  secured  their  point,  the  certifi- 
cated relation.  They  play  the  game  of 
courtship,  then,  not  with  attributes,  as  in 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

the  beginning  men  had  to  play  it,  but  with 
effects.  They  win  not  by  making  them- 
selves indispensable  to  the  Soul  Maker,  but 
to  the  appetites  of  men.  And  the  judgment 
on  them  is  that  they  are  still  rated  too  much 
by  the  reactions  they  can  set  up  in  a  particu- 
lar man  rather  than  by  their  contribution 
to  society.  That  all  this  is  contrary  to  the 
nature  of  women  is  shown  by  their  quick 
abandonment  of  the  means,  once  the  end  is 
attained;  by  the  inverse  ratio  of  their  ca- 
pacity to  make  men  feel  to  the  index  of  their 
racial  worth ;  by  the  repugnance  of  the  bet- 
ter sort  of  women  toward  making  any  ef- 
fort at  all  to  arouse  the  interest  and  atten- 
tion of  men.  Whether  men  know  it  or  not, 
women  know  that  when  a  man  says  of  a 
woman  that  she  "won"  him,  he  has  said  al- 
most the  worst  thing  for  the  quality  of  her 
attraction. 

All  this  is  too  much  covered  up,  glanced 
132 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

at  too  obliquely.  It  has  to  be,  otherwise 
young  women,  ignorant  of  the  real  bearing 
of  many  of  the  things  they  are  trained  in, 
would  revolt.  That  they  revolt  in  numbers 
against  the  indignity  of  measuring  their  be- 
haviour by  its  possible  effect  on  a  hypotheti- 
cal suitor,  and  against  the  preciosity  of  emo- 
tion which  establishes  the  high  ground  of 
conventional  femininity,  is  a  hopeful  au- 
gury. It  marks  the  return  of  reality  to  our 
mating  behaviours. 


1 


VI 

thing  that  marriage  can  be 
legitimately  asked  to  do  for  us  is, 
first  of  all,  to  satisfy  the  hunger 
of  the  body  for  its  natural  mate.  This  is 
indispensable.  Herein  is  the  seed  of  its  own 
permanence,  the  only  legitimate  ground 
for  the  satisfaction  of  that  other  great  hu- 
man demand,  the  desire  for  offspring.  And 
finally  it  must  satisfy  the  need  of  compan- 
ionship on  the  intimate  and  personal  side  of 
life.  Undoubtedly  the  happiest  marriages 
are  those  which  carry  the  sense  of  com- 
panionship into  the  farthest,  finest  ramifica- 
tions of  thought  and  endeavour,  but  there 
can,  in  the  nature  of  things,  be  no  compul- 
134 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

sion  beyond  the  personal  interest.  To  be 
proud  of  and  pleased  with  each  other,  to  be 
concerned  for  each  other's  health,  consid- 
erate of  each  other's  interests,  active  in  com- 
fort and  care,  is  much  more  important 
than  a  common  taste  for  Italian  poetry  or 
a  mutual  detestation  of  Wagnerian  opera. 
It  is  possible  for  a  married  pair  to  sur- 
vive being  bored  with  one  another's  opin- 
ions or  pleasures,  but  it  is  indispensable 
that  they  should  not  be  bored  with  one  an- 
other. 

There  may  be  a  few  other  items  required 
by  the  particular  instance,  but  I  know  of 
nothing  else  which  may  be  insisted  upon  as 
a  universal  concomitant  of  marriage.  Sim- 
ple as  these  conditions  seem,  a  great  many 
matings  fail  of  them,  chiefly  because  we 
aren't  always  satisfied  to  have  it  as  simple 
as  that,  but  go  on  asking  of  marriage  the 
things  it  was  never  meant  to  pay;  because, 
135 


LOVE    AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

simple  as  these  two  things  are,  we  haven't 
yet  arrived  at  any  competent  method  of 
knowing  when  we  are  getting  them,  and  be- 
cause, as  I  said  at  the  beginning,  we  are 
often  more  concerned  with  marriage  modes 
than  with  the  inherent  principles  of  mating. 


What  must  be  insisted  upon  for  the  im- 
provement of  marriage  before  it  is  entered 
upon,  is  the  clarification  of  our  ideas  about 
it.  We  must  see  its  naked  power  upon  us 
for  what  good  and  what  generic  ill. 
Stripped  of  all  the  rag-tag  of  obsolescent 
modes,  all  the  bright,  tasteless  tinsel  of 
sentiment  by  which  its  vital  functions  are 
obscured,  we  must  accept  it  first  and  last  as 
a  sex  relation,  striking  its  proper  note  in 
the  chord  of  human  endeavour,  and  seeing 
it  thus  uncomplicated  by  problems  of  food 
136 


LOVE    AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

and  shelter,  learn  to  ask  no  more  of  it  than 
that  it  fulfil  itself  as  the  great  adventure  of 
sexual  life. 

If  I  have  been  plain  on  this  point,  I  mean 
to  be  plainer.  To  the  neglect  of  this  pri- 
mary requirement  of  right  mating,  based 
upon  we  know  not  what  correspondences  of 
vital  impulses,  what  rhythms,  vibrations, 
elusive,  subtle  bodily  sympathies  are  trace- 
able most  of  those  evils  which  invest  society 
under  the  particular  name  of  "immorality." 
It  is  not  wealth,  not  luxury,  not  the  indus- 
trial system  nor  the  hardening  of  class  lines 
which  produce  those  outbreaks  of  lascivi- 
ousness,  of  loose  reading,  of  responsibility, 
of  veiled  promiscuity,  which  from  time  to 
time  have  characterised  periods  of  national 
history.  It  is  the  substitution,  which  all 
these  conditions  foster,  of  other  considera- 
tions of  money  lust,  social  ambition,  pro- 
prietary pride,  culture,  of  religion  even,  for 
137 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

the  natural  mating  impulse.  Spiritual  qual- 
ities are  the  result  of  right  mating  and  not 
the  occasion  of  it,  just  as  material  success,  a 
good  home,  social  poise,  ought  to  be  the  out- 
come of  the  matching  of  talent  and  en- 
deavour in  man  and  woman,  and  not  the 
excuse  for  their  living  together.  It  is  im- 
mensely more  important  that  a  mating  pair 
should  relish  kissing  together  than  that 
they  both  should  be  Presbyterians,  and 
a  better  guarantee  for  their  attaining 
the  super-union  which  is  the  Soul  Maker's 
mark. 

And  yet  how  little,  how  extraordinarily 
little,  is  afforded  the  young  as  a  basis  for  se- 
lection. So  far,  instruction  has  been  largely 
in  the  opinions  of  society;  what  is  required 
is  knowledge  of  the  facts.  The  egoistic 
method  of  the  past,  in  which  truth  was  im- 
parted or  withheld  according  to  the  paren- 
tal notion  of  need  or  propriety,  has  resulted 
138 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

in  bringing  too  many  to  the  great  adven- 
ture in  complete  ignorance  of  it. 

Even  yet  we  have  not  sufficient  honest 
experimentation  in  methods  of  presenting 
the  subject  to  the  young  so  that  it  may  clear 
the  reactions  which  the  mere  contemplation 
of  sex  sets  up  in  the  unstable  states  of  adoles- 
cence. The  whole  subject  is  shrouded  in 
distorting  mysteries,  in  social  hesitancies 
and  indecencies. 

A  very  little  observation  of  matings  as 
they  take  place  in  society  simpler  than  ours 
convinces  that  there  is  a  mating  instinct,  a 
subconscious  sureness  by  which  nature 
flashes  from  young  breast  to  young  breast 
the  knowledge  of  what  types  she  would 
weld  for  the  increasing  of  the  nations. 
Probably  if  the  obscuring  mysteries  were 
laid  by  facts  made  commonplace,  instinct 
would  wake  again  along  the  unfathomed 
outer  border  of  the  mating  consciousness. 
139 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

In  the  absence  of  instinct  we  need  knowl- 
edge and  more  knowledge. 

§ 

And,  if  it  did  so  awake,  instinct  might  be 
easily  frustrated  by  our  narrow  social  con- 
tacts. Among  the  two  or  three  marrying 
opportunities  offered  any  one  of  us,  it  is  fre- 
quently the  case  that  not  one  of  them  pro- 
vides the  necessary  correlation  of  personal 
interests,  the  common  objective.  The  first 
thing  to  go  about  for  the  betterment  of  mar- 
riage conditions  in  general,  is  a  deliberate 
provision  for  increased  social  contact.  Even 
heaven  must  have  room  to  work  in. 

"But  their  homes — their  mothers " 

Valda  was  thinking  in  terms  of  her  class, 
a  very  small  class,  in  which  parents  are  able 
to  live  along  with  their  generation  so  suc- 
cessfully that  their  advice  to  their  children 
is  really  worth  something.  They  must  be 
140 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

materially  able,  moreover,  to  provide  an 
adequate  social  range  without  the  assistance 
of  the  municipality.  But  the  generality  of 
parents  can  no  more  do  this  than  they  can 
educate  their  children  without  the  public 
schools. 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  the  average  home  is 
one  of  the  worst  possible  places  for  young 
people  to  court  in — which  is  perhaps  why 
so  much  courting  is  done  on  the  street,  in 
the  college,  at  the  dance  hall.  The  average 
home  with  its  one  living  room,  its  weary 
and  self-absorbed  adults,  its  clamorous 
younger  children,  the  immanence  of  the 
parental  viewpoint,  the  self-consciousness 
of  youth  rinding  itself — this  is  the  least  pro- 
pitious environment  for  the  self-explication 
which  must  come  then  if  ever  to  the  mating 
pair. 

Here  in  America,  perhaps  everywhere  in 
this  pushing  age,  the  matter  is  complicated 
141 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

by  the  wide  divergence  of  social  ideal  be- 
tween parents  and  children.  Few  daugh- 
ters expect  or  would  accept  the  regime  of 
their  mothers;  if  the  young  people  are  to 
understand  one  another  on  this  point,  come 
together  on  the  new  ground  of  an  advancing 
generation,  they  must  be  able  to  clear  them- 
selves of  all  implication  of  parental  en- 
vironment. 

The  unconscious  recognition  of  this  need 
of  standing  for  their  own  future  to  one  an- 
other drives  them  apart  and  aside.  They 
seek  out  a  dangerous  and  misleading  pri- 
vacy; dangerous  because  often  secret,  and 
misleading  because  two  young  people  left 
absolutely  to  themselves  can  seem  anything 
they  like  to  each  other.  What  is  required 

is  that  they  should  make  the  tentative  moves 

i 

in  a  state  of  free  association  with  their  own 

generation.    Against  a  background  of  their 

fellows,  those  with  whom  they  must  later 

142 


LOVE   AND   THE   SOUL   MAKER 

neighbour  or  compete,  they  display  rela- 
tive values  that  do  not  come  to  light  in  adult 
society.  This  is  probably  the  reason  why 
coeducational  marriages  show  such  a  high 
percentage  of  successes.  There  are  few 
things  a  young  couple  may  not  get  to  know 
about  one  another  during  four  years  in  col- 
lege. 

There  is  another  reason  why  the  estab- 
lishment of  social  centres  for  the  purpose  of 
providing  free  association  of  the  young, 
should  become  the  serious  business  of  our 
educational  leaders.  It  is  that  young  peo- 
ple of  whatever  social  derivation,  are  in- 
trinsically entitled  in  their  mating  adven- 
tures to  the  best  advice  that  their  genera- 
tion affords. 

We  do  not  think  of  trusting  the  teaching 
of  arithmetic  to  the  inexpert  parent;  medi- 
cal inspection  is  in  the  hands  of  specialists. 
But  mating  advice  is  left  to  be  plucked  from 
143 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

whatever  unlikely  bush.  Theoretically 
parents  should  be  able  to  furnish  their  chil- 
dren with  the  best  thought  of  the  period  at 
any  given  moment  of  it.  Actually  few  have 
the  gift  for  it  or  the  time;  some  have  not 
even  the  inclination — a  state  of  affairs 
which  does  not  make  the  young  any  less  en- 
titled to  it  than  to  the  best  thought  about 
cube  roots  and  vaccination. 


It  is  possible  that  such  increased  facility 
for  free  selective  activities  would  of  itself 
do  much  to  obviate  one  of  the  most  obscure 
sources  of  unsatisfactory  and  impermanent 
,  marriages.  I  mean  the  natural  differences 
in  human  capacity.  It  is  important  for  any 
particular  marriage  that  the  parties  to  it 
retain  the  same  ratio  of  development,  of  in- 
tellectual co-ordinations.  It  would  seem 

. 

that  the  intellect,  like  the  organism,  strug- 
144 


y 


/,/:     '/^ 

x^-x^  ,     ijSz 

*    .>£-<-'-<  ^     -£ 7  ^tr&Jf^. 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

i  /  :;.\ 
gles  to  attain  the  limit  of  its  type ;  once  the 

limit  is  reached,  it  cannot  by  taking  pains 
add  anything  to  that.  A  man  whose  mind 
closes  on  him  at  thirty  remains  thirty  for 
the  rest  of  his  three  score  years;  if  he  be 
married  to  a  woman  capable  of  ten  or  fif- 
teen years  more  expansion,  it  is  hardly  pos- 
sible or  desirable  that  the  original  bond 
should  hold  under  the  strain  of  that  parti- 
tion. Nothing  is  more  heartbreaking  than 
the  mutual  recognition  of  such  disparity;  it 
is  at  once  so  hopeless  and  so  unblamable. 
Youth  and  charm  will  compensate  in  a  de- 
gree, wealth  and  position  obscure  its  most 
rending  phases,  nothing  but  active  sexual 
sympathy  will  support  it  without  disinte- 
gration. 

It  is  a  phase  of  married  life  which  until 

recently  has  not  received  much  sympathy. 

For  men  who  discovered  this  disparity  in 

their  wives  there  has  been,  according  as 

145 

r\ ,  - 

v  .-4 

•  ^ 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

they  take  it,  the  consolation  of  the  admitted 
inferiority  of  women,  or  the  reproach  of 
"not  keeping  up,"  and  for  wives  who  dis- 
covered it  in  their  husbands  there  has  been 
the  cry  of  lese  majeste.  Had  not  our  edu- 
cators been  more  concerned  with  crediting 
students  with  percentages  in  fractions  and 
geography  than  with  determining  the  index 
of  personal  efficiency,  we  might  now  be  in 
possession  of  some  means  of  matching  the 
future  with  the  present  to  prevent  the  most 
flagrant  disasters.  What  renders  most  mat- 
ing advice  unacceptable  is  its  purely  hypo- 
thetical character.  Young  passion  may 
flout  sage  waggings  of  the  head  when  so 
many  heads  have  wagged  mistakenly.  But 
even  the  young  are  prevented  by  exact 
knowledge. 

The  seven-leagued  strides  that  have  been 
taken  in  the  study  of  personal  efficiency  in 
the  interests  of  trade  and  manufacture,  make 
146 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

it  not  too  unlikely  to  say  that  we  shall  soon 
be  able  to  know  as  much  about  the  people 
we  marry  and  expose  our  children  to  the 
chances  of  marrying,  as  about  those  we  hire. 

"And  then,"  Valda  threw  in  hopefully, 
"there  are  the  eugenists." 

The  eugenists  have  at  once  too  much  to 
say  and  too  little.  They  can  deal  with  cer- 
tainty only  with  futures,  and,  though  it  is 
important  to  the  race  to  know  the  probable 
physical  character  of  its  grandchildren,  it 
is  not  yet  proved  that  that  has  anything  to 
do  with  married  felicity  in  the  present  gen- 
eration. One  thing  they  can  do  for  us,  and 
that  is  to  find  an  absolute  authority  for  in- 
terposing a  reasonable  period  of  considera- 
tion between  a  demand  for  a  licence  to 
marry  and  the  granting  of  it. 

In  order  to  protect  the  unborn,  it  is 
obligatory  upon  society  to  keep  records  and 
to  force  upon  those  contemplating  marriage 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

the  knowledge  of  the  ancestral  baggage 
which  they  carry  into  the  new  venture.  To 
do  this  properly  something  more  must  be 
shown  besides  the  mere  wish  to  marry.  As 
matters  now  stand,  any  two  who  can  make 
the  county  official  believe  they  are  of  legal 
age  can  be  joined  for  life  within  a  couple 
of  hours  of  making  up  their  minds  to  it. 
The  interim  which  the  eugenist  may  de- 
mand for  the  proper  facing  of  their  ances- 
tral past  and  correlating  it  with  the  future, 
would  be  a  distinct  gain  in  directions  which 
have  nothing  to  do  with  the  increase  of  pop- 
ulation. 

For  there  are  other  considerations  be- 
sides children,  considerations  which  must 
still  be  met  after  it  may  be  concluded  that 
the  particular  pair  have  no  contribution  to 
make  to  racial  continuance.  Of  these  the 
eugenists  not  only  know  nothing,  but  may 
even  find  themselves  in  the  serious  predica- 
148 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

ment,  supposing  they  could  determine 
what  traits  are  best  to  breed  for  the  im- 
provement of  the  species,  of  discovering 
that  they  are  not  at  all  those  which  are  most 
auspicious  for  living  together  domestically. 
Bear  in  mind  that  I  find  this  of  prime  im- 
portance. Racial  improvement,  if  it  means 
anything,  means  the  accretion  of  mentality, 
of  personal  power,  the  accelerated  pace 
which  any  two  can  gain  while  they  are 
otherwise  occupied  than  in  multiplying. 
Indeed,  if  man  is  to  be  distinguished  from 
the  fish,  the  flower,  the  beast  of  the  field,  the 
existence  of  such  general  gain  would  seem 
the  only  excuse  for  propagating  at  all. 
Whatever  pair  has  contrived  to  add  some- 
thing to  what  their  parents  were,  adds  it  to 
the  race  as  well  without  offspring  as  with 
them.  We  are  all  of  us  inheritors  of  the 
genius  of  great  men  more  directly  than  the 
children  of  their  loins;  it  matters  nothing 
149 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

that  they  leave  us  no  descendants  of  their 
name. 

Marriage  then  should  be  for  the  in- 
crement of  social  worth,  and  all  our  thought 
about  it  should  be  to  make  it  serve  this 
primal  use.  If  the  union,  in  the  light  of  the 
most  we  know  about  it,  prove  suitable  for 
children,  let  them  count  themselves  twice 
blessed.  But,  if  marrying  be  simply  to 
breed,  why,  Pithecanthropus  skipping  on  a 
hill  can  do  as  well  for  us.  We  are  made 
men  and  women  chiefly  by  what  we  can  do 
for  one  another. 


VII 

WE  had  sat  so  long,  subdued  by 
languor  to  the  mood  of  the 
place  and  the  day,  that  our 
voices  had  dropped  to  a  note  scarcely 
louder  than  the  water  noises.  Wheels  went 
by  on  the  bridge,  raising  the  heavy  scent  of 
the  country  dust,  and  presently  a  kingfisher 
flitting  down  the  long  green  room  which  en- 
closed it,  skimmed  the  surface  of  the  golden 
water,  skimmed  and  splashed  and  flitted. 
Around  us  the  warm,  woman-hearted  day 
breathed  deep  for  peace,  and  somewhere, 
though  we  were  not  sure  if  it  were  deep 
within  the  wood  or  deeper  in  ourselves, 
sounded  the  airy,  invisible  laughter  which 
is  never  far  from  women  when  they  talk  of 
IS' 


I 
UJ 


•;/      A 

i 

.  3 

'  f,  ' 

Uv    X.rw 

LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

these  things — are  not  all  women  encom- 
passed so  with  voices — waif  little  souls  that 
flock  to  the  gates  about  to  be  drawn  back? 
Yet  all  this  time  not  a  word  had  been  said 
about  children. 


Not  that  I  would  abate  anything  of  the 
rank  of  maternity  in  the  scale  of  experience, 
but  find  it  important  to  distinguish  between 
the  desire  of  offspring  for  their  own  sake 
and  the  normal  interactions  of  mate-love 
and  family  life.  For  though  in  many 
women,  and  these  of  the  finest  strain,  the 
racial  instinct  declares  itself  as  the  clamour 
of  the  unborn  at  the  gates  of  consciousness, 
it  is  impossible  to  escape  the  conviction  that 
much  of  the  expressed  longing  for  children 
is  desire  making  itself  known  obliquely  in 
the  only  form  admissible  to  our  social 
meticulacy.  It  is  not  thought  absolutely  in- 
152 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

criminating  for  an  unmarried  woman  to 
wish  for  children,  but  we  prefer  her  not  to 
admit  the  natural  hunger  of  the  body  for  its 
mate.  Yet  it  is  passion  rather  than  child- 
bearing  which  leads  out  the  full  chord  of 
life;  not  barren  women  but  unmated  who 
exhibit  vagaries  which  have  a  definite 
standing  as  phenomena  of  sex  suppression. 
You  must  take  it  from  me  without  particu- 
larisation  that  I  can  learn  of  no  tribe  that 
has  not  some  method  of  avoiding  the  natu- 
ral conclusions  of  marriage  when,  in  the 
face  of  war  or  famine,  the  common  welfare 
seems  to  demand  it.  Race  suicide  as  we 
know  it  made  its  appearance  as  a  form  of 
race  preservation.  In  dry  years  even  the 
quail  will  not  mate. 

So  far  as  the  demand  for  children  is  ac- 
tual, it  must  adjust  itself  to  considerations 
of  income,  the  industrial  outlook,  the  he- 
reditary endowment.    What  we  have  to  do 
153 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

with  here  is  not  the  offspring,  but  the 
psychic  reagency  of  parenthood  modifying 
the  form  and  progression  of  marriage.  Cer- 
tain manifestations  of  the  procreant  impulse 
are  so  intertwined  with  mate-love  that  they 
may  be  taken  as  right  signs  of  it.  In  par- 
ticular I  refer  to  the  nest-making  propen- 
sity. 


It  is  a  question  how  far  mother-thought 
has  established  itself  by  association  and  in- 
heritance in  the  male  mating  consciousness, 
but  not  the  most  sophisticated  bride  can  es- 
cape the  disposition  toward  handcraft, 
comforting  and  enhancing.  It  is  an  instinct 
that  renews  itself  under  right  loving  as  reg- 
ularly as  the  turn  of  the  year  sets  the  for- 
lornest  spinster  canary  tearing  the  paper  in 
its  cage.  The  quickened  appreciations  of 
beauty  and  the  movement  toward  adorn- 
154 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

ment,  which  are  part  of  the  self-dramatisa- 
tion of  the  courting  period,  assume,  when 
impregnation  is  imminent,  forms  from 
which  are  derived  long  trains  of  bridal  cus- 
toms— the  nest,  the  linen  chest,  the  trous- 
seau, the  engagement  "shower."  The  whole 
nature,  strongly  stirred,  gives  off  overtones 
of  the  creative  impulse.  The  high  note  of 
personal  achievement  which  is  struck  by 
male  passion  finds  its  later  feminine  rever- 
beration in  altruism,  even  though  as  uncon- 
scious as  the  altruism  of  the  sea  bird  making 
soft  the  place  of  her  young  with  feathers 
from  her  breast.  It  is  this  potentiality  of 
mate-love  for  reverberating  throughout  the 
organism  which  attaches  a  grave  moral  re- 
sponsibility to  its  awakening  in  the  virgin 
mind.  Women  have  been  shaken,  the  finer 
the  more  easily,  into  death  and  madness 
by  the  sudden  stoppage  of  this  master  chord 
as  delicate  glass  vessels  may  be  shattered 
155 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

by  the  cessation  of  the  vibrations  of  a  violin 
string. 

All  old  literature  freely  and  nobly  ex- 
presses this  active  ache  of  the  body  polar- 
ised by  passion  for  its  primal  function,  and 
the  sense  of  frustration  in  the  crisis  of 
which  no  appreciable  mark  remains. 
("Nights  I  dream  I  hear  mine  crying,  and 
I  wake  and  find  my  own  tears  on  my  face," 
said  Valda  MacNath.)  The  begrudged 
concession  of  science  to  the  capacity  of  the 
reproductive  process  for  reorganising  the 
vital  forces,  occasions  no  wonderment  to  the 
woman  of  average  experience.  The  wonder 
would  be  not  that  the  characteristics  of  the 
first  born's  father  should  be  stamped  on  all 
subsequent  offspring,  but  rather  that  it 
shouldn't.  The  psychic  states  of  expectancy 
are  almost  totally  unexplored  by  that  au- 
thoritative class  who  give  names  to  things, 
but  it  is  known  to  the  observing  few  that, 


LOVE   AND   THE   SOUL   MAKER 

so  tonic  are  its  interior  phases,  women  have 
not  infrequently  been  led  by  them  to  bear 
children  when  they  have  no  natural  apti- 
tude for  the  care  and  training  of  the  young. 
One  suspects,  too,  that  the  capacity  for  sus- 
tained emotional  states  in  women  newly 
awakened,  so  surprising,  even  terrifying  to 
men,  is  but  a  suspension  of  the  body's  de- 
mand, not  to  be  quieted  except  by  its  imme- 
morial function.  Passion  is  the  summons, 
the  knocking  at  the  door,  which  sets  in  ar- 
ray all  the  forces  of  life.  The  business  of 
love  is  by  no  means  just  loving. 

What  we  need  at  this  juncture,  in  order 
to  determine  the  full  relation  of  mate-love 
and  maternity,  is  a  sound  study  of  the  ef- 
fect of  the  psychic  states  of  the  parents  and 
especially  of  the  mother  on  the  vitality  and 
personal  endowment  of  the  child.  A  medi- 
cal profession  which  insists  on  treating  all 
the  manifestations  of  pregnancy  as  mere  re- 
157 


LOVE   AND   THE   SOUL   MAKER 

flexes  of  physical  disorder  cannot  get  us 
very  far  with  this  inquiry.  For  it  is  not,  at 
its  naturalest,  a  disorder  at  all,  but  the  su- 
preme function  of  an  organism;  it  has  no 
more  to  do  with  disease  than  has  the  drop- 
ping of  petals  in  the  fruiting  orchard.  It 
follows  then  that  any  accompanying  mental 
or  emotional  states  deserve  our  most  careful 
question  as  to  their  ultimate  bearing  on  the 
problems  of  the  family.  At  present  the 
most  we  can  make  of  them  is  evidence  that, 
just  as  in  the  social  state  no  pair  marries  to 
itself,  so  in  the  face  of  expectancy  none  loves 
even  to  itself. 


To  this  set  of  reactions  which  are  con- 
cerned with  nest-making  and  the  nurture  of 
the  young  we  owe  the  best  and  the  worst 
that  can  come  of  mating  procedures.  Out 
of  this  has  grown  the  ideal  of  the  home, 
158 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

that  safe  and  secret  place  of  self-reali- 
sation. Out  of  it  also  has  sprung  that 
mausoleum  of  modern  marriage,  the  estab- 
lishment. 

The  desire  of  Things  which  comes  upon 
young  couples  at  their  mating  is  the  voice 
of  the  Soul  Maker.  A  modern  equipment 
of  pots  and  beds  and  roofs  over  them  is 
important,  not  to  the  condition  of  being 
married,  but  to  what  may  reasonably  be 
expected  to  come  to  pass  after  marriage.  A 
growing  appreciation  of  just  what  things 
are  indispensable  to  the  rearing  of  a  fam- 
ily augments  the  sense  of  responsibility  on 
this  point,  but  the  development  of  indi- 
vidual control  over  the  incident  of  child- 
bearing  keeps  it  from  being  burdensome. 
As  a  matter  of  fact,  the  actual  preparation 
which  young  couples  have  to  make  to  meet 
the  contingency  of  offspring  is  much  less 
than  that  required  by  the  conditions  of  a 
159 


generation  ago.  Few  people  marry  nowa- 
days without  at  least  a  tentative  under- 
standing of  how  they  are  to  meet  the  ques- 
tion of  having  a  family.  But  women,  even 
in  the  act  of  determining  against  child- 
bearing,  are  disposed  to  forget  that  the  ob- 
servance paid  to  the  nest-making  impulse  is 
paid  to  its  potentiality,  and  can  in  no  case 
be  claimed  if  the  office  is  refused.  The 
home,  in  spite  of  all  the  sentimental  slop  in 
which  it  is  too  often  swamped,  should  be 
the  expression  of  a  reality.  Its  source  is  in 
the  sacred  seed  of  activity  which  lies  at  the 
core  of  all  right  passion.  It  is  the  nest,  built 
out  hour  by  hour  in  answer  to  an  expanding 
need.  We  confuse  it,  by  its  reactions,  with 
the  presence  of  the  beloved,  with  the  sense 
of  familiarity  and  ease  which  comes  of  our 
adjustment  to  the  familiar  landmark,  the 
fireplace,  the  easy-chair,  the  ancient  pine 
or  the  sunset-painted  mountain.  It  is  in  fact 
1 60 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

neither  a  place  nor  a  state  of  being;  it  is  a 
thing  accomplished.  And  as  such  the  home 
is  less  and  less  often  found  among  us. 
Fewer  people  build  their  own  houses,  al- 
most nobody  makes  his  own  furniture,  linen 
is  spun  for  us,  carpets  woven,  wall  decora- 
tions come  no  longer  from  the  hand  of  the 
chatelaine,  but  are  included  in  the  builder's 
contract.  We  have  substituted,  in  a  degree, 
social  activities  for  those  primarily  con- 
nected with  mating  impulses;  to  a  very 
great  degree  the  demand  on  the  part  of 
women  for  increased  opportunity  for  such 
social  participation,  is  due  to  the  decline  of 
nest-making.  This  is  a  natural  and  right 
substitution,  for  social  labours  such  as  at- 
tract women  in  general  are  conserving  and 
protective;  they  are  the  outgrowth  of  the 
mothering  activities  set  in  motion  by  mar- 
riage. It  is  probably  the  logical  develop- 
ment of  soul-making  that  the  extension  of 
161 


LOVE    AND   THE    SOUL    MAKER 

feminine  activity  should  be  in  this  direction. 
It  is  the  one  thing  that  will  save  us  from 
the  establishment. 

For  the  establishment  comes  fully  fur- 
nished forth  from  the  upholsterer's.  It  is 
the  outgrowth  not  of  any  marrying  neces- 
sity, but  of  the  instinct  for  self-dramatisa- 
tion which  awakes  under  the  stimulus  of 
passion,  an  outgrowth,  an  excrescence,  the 
tail  of  the  peacock.  It  has,  as  Heaven  be 
thanked  all  human  demonstrations  have,  its 
element  of  superhumanness,  of  spiritualis- 
ing grace,  inasmuch  as  it  enshrines  the  ob- 
ject of  affection  or  arises,  as  it  frequently 
does  in  men,  in  the  movement  of  sacrifice, 
the  laying  up  about  the  beloved  of  things 
esteemed  precious,  as  on  an  altar.  But  when 
all  that  is  said,  the  worst  remains,  which  is 
that  it  takes  its  measure  from  the  eye  of  the 
beholder.  It  is  the  stage  setting  of  our  re- 
lation to  what  is  called  society,  the  scenic 
162 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

air  and  light  which  limn  us,  not  as  we  are, 
but  as  we  would  like  to  seem  to  others.  The 
impulse  which  preserves  to  us  the  estab- 
lishment is  the  same  that  dictates  the  survi- 
val of  monarchial  forms  in  countries  of  un- 
deniably democratic  tendency.  The  estab- 
lishment is  a  symbol,  just  as  the  thrones  and 
court  appurtenances  are  the  most  impres- 
sive kind  of  a  symbol  of  a  profound  feeling 
for  the  dignity  of  human  relations.  But 
neither  of  them  are  indispensable  to  the 
processes  either  of  marriage  or  government, 
and  are  important  only  as  expressions  of  a 
reality.  Undoubtedly  there  are  moments  in 
every  marriage  which  would  yield  surer 
values  if  they  could  be  lived  in  stately 
dwellings — I  would  have  every  place  in 
which  women  go  to  bear  children  made  no- 
ble as  well  as  sanitary.  But  human  experi- 
ence proves  nothing  so  much  as  that  the  es- 
tablishment, as  a  perquisite  of  marriage, 
163 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

adds  nothing  whatever  to  the  spiritual  ex- 
tensions of  mate-love. 

It  is  important  to  make  distinctions  of 
this  kind  on  other  grounds  than  opinion,  for 
between  the  practical  confusion  of  these 
two — the  necessity  for  a  suitable  environ- 
ment for  the  function  of  the  family  and  the 
demand  for  one  which  shall  meet  the  ex- 
pectancy of  our  social  set — many  young 
couples  fall  into  confusion.  It  must  be 
woven  into  the  texture  of  education  that  any 
demand  on  the  part  of  woman  for  an  estab- 
lishment, houses,  servants,  anything  over 
and  above  the  requirements  of  child-bear- 
ing— which  are  much  more  simple  than 
many  of  us  are  willing  to  believe — is  an  ex- 
orbitant demand.  The  right  of  a  man  to 
refuse  to  sacrifice  his  personal  achievement 
in  order  to  secure  for  his  family  more  than 
the  stated  requirement  should  be  recognised 
as  a  primary  right,  which  to  infringe  upon 
164 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

a  woman  should  blush  as  much  as  to  buy 
these  things  with  her  personal  favour.  The 
amount  of  worldly  goods  which  a  married 
pair  may  wish  to  get  and  enjoy  together  is 
a  matter  of  private  taste  and  inclination; 
the  amount  which  they  may  reasonably  de- 
mand of  one  another  should  be  regulated 
by  the  fundamental  family  need,  and  has  no 
reference  whatever  to  personal  predilec- 
tion. 

s 

Woman,  thrown  back  on  bearing  as  her 
chief  excuse  for  being,  has  been  disposed 
latterly  to  magnify  her  office. 

Motherhood  is  a  service,  meeting  a  rea- 
sonably constant  racial  need.  If  the  need 
be  sharp  enough  it  may  become  an  obliga- 
tion, but  it  is  in  line  with  our  latest  science 
to  constitute  it  a  privilege  rather  than  a 
right.  It  is  only  in  the  sense  that  the  whole 
165 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

round  of  human  experience  is  the  right  of 
each  one  of  us  that  it  can  be  so  considered. 
The  new  and  sharp  insistence  upon  the 
right  to  bear  children,  which  has  risen  upon 
us  from  the  old  world,  has  no  claim  upon 
our  attention  except  as  the  social  maladroit- 
ness  of  which  it  is  the  outgrowth,  can  be 
held  to  be  permanent  and  incurable.  For 
this  cry  which  comes  from  England  and  in 
one  strong  and  certain  voice  from  the  north 
of  Europe,  demanding  freedom  for  women 
to  choose  the  fathers  of  their  children 
where  they  will  and  without  the  obligation 
of  the  domestic  tie,  is  primarily  the  cry  of 
the  unmated.  It  is  a  protest,  not  against 
marriage  nor  even  against  particular  forms 
of  it,  but  against  the  shameful  waste  of 
womanhood  in  enforced  celibacy.  It  is 
solely  due  to  the  disequilibrium  of  popula- 
tion, owing  to  the  deportation  of  men  in 
standing  armies  and  enterprises  of  colonisa- 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

tion.  The  surplusage  of  women  in  England 
from  these  causes  alone  is  rapidly  reaching 
the  point  where  some  form  of  polygamous 
living  is  inevitable,  and,  if  the  conditions 
were  admitted  unchanging,  would  be  ad- 
visable. 

But  such  a  cutting  off  of  a  large  percent- 
age of  the  population  from  the  primary  hu- 
man experience  is  neither  necessary  nor  un- 
alterable ;  it  is  simply  stupid.  Enough  men 
are  born  in  any  country  to  satisfy  all  rea- 
sonable mating  demand  of  the  women  born 
there.  The  stupidity  lies  in  sending  them 
out  of  the  country  without  sending  the 
women  with  them,  in  breeding  a  type  of 
woman  who  cannot  go  everywhere  her  man 
goes;  most  of  all  in  the  stupid  persistence 
in  organised  warfare,  the  greatest  single  so- 
cial obstacle  to  right  mating.  In  the  sense, 
then,  that  these  women  are  prevented  from 
the  normal  functions  of  womanhood  by 
167 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

colossal  social  ineptitudes,  they  are  justified 
of  their  "right." 

They  have  a  right  to  a  voice  in  the  gov- 
ernment which  offers  up  their  opportunity 
for  racial  service  on  the  altar  of  Bellona; 
a  right  to  admission  to  all  the  ranks  of  life, 
all  the  labours  in  which  they  may  walk  side 
by  side  with  men,  their  mates;  a  right  to 
abolish  war  or  modify  it  at  the  points  where 
it  interferes  most  sorely  with  their  wom- 
anly prerogative.  In  short,  the  right 
women  have  is  not  so  much  a  right  to  the 
half  loaf,  the  unfathered  child,  the  uncer- 
tificated  relation,  as  the  right  to  readjust 
the  conditions  of  society  until  there  is  room 
in  it  for  normal  human  development. 

§ 

"You  wouldn't  agree,  then,  with " 

Valda    named   one    of    the    newly    arisen 

prophets  of  sex   rather  timidly,   "that   a 

168 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

woman  is  entitled  to  a  child  any  way  she 
can  get  it." 

What  I  really  believe  is  that  a  man  is  en- 
titled to  father  his  child  by  any  woman  who 
bears  it.  This  sore  egotism  of  woman, 
fevered  by  centuries  of  repression  and 
made  fierce  by  sex  starvation,  which  leads 
her  to  brandish  her  creative  function  in  the 
face  of  all  the  powers  and  to  sink  man  to  a 
mere  biological  necessity,  serves  no  doubt 
to  restore  the  social  equilibrium.  She  may 
be  forgiven  at  times  for  failing  to  see  that 
it  is  not  bearing  but  parenting  which  serves 
the  Soul  Maker,  and  that  man  has  found 
social  enlargement  in  the  care  of  the  young 
generation  rather  than  in  its  begetting. 
Moreover,  the  right  of  any  woman  to  have 
a  child  is  no  more  than  equal  to  the  right 
of  the  child  to  what  comes  to  him  from  the 
male  parental  influence.  The  long  time 
during  which  nature  has  been  at  the  pains 
169 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

to  expose  the  child  to  such  influence  would 
suggest  that  it  is  not  too  lightly  to  be  dis- 
pensed with.  It  must  not  be  overlooked 

that  men  need  children  quite  as  much  as 
Q,rvv 

women  need  them,  and  the  long  dependence 

of  the  child  on  the  personal  care  of  the 

— — . — — - — . — • 

mother  should  not  beguile  us  to  blink  the 
obvious  inference.  The  burgeoning  mind 
of  the  child  requires  for  its  due  spherosity 
the  influence  of  interested  male  compan- 
ionship. Some  form  of  polygamy,  which  is 
the  ancient  tribal  method  of  correcting  the 
waste  and  excess  of  prolonged  warfare,  is 
probably  better  than  the  divorcing  of  men 
in  large  numbers  from  their  parental  re- 
sponsibilities. In  the  less  self-conscious  and 
egotistic  states  of  society  readjustments  of 
this  sort  are  seen  always  to  reorganise  about 
the  needs  of  the  race  rather  than  the  desires 
of  men  or  women.  There  is  probably 
something  deeper  than  prejudice  or  tradi- 
170 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

tion  which  makes,  in  any  society,  a  marked 
figure  of  the  lone  woman  and  her  unpar- 
ented offspring. 

§ 

For,  much  as  children  have  to  do  with 
modifying  the  modes  of  marriage,  they 
have  still  more  with  establishing  its  perma- 
nence. Allowing  for  a  normal  period  of 
gestation,  at  least  three  years  of  a  woman's 
time  are  required  to  produce  a  child  and 
bring  it  to  the  point  where  its  bodily  wel- 
fare is  not  likely  to  be  interfered  with  by 
her  own  states  of  mind.  For  the  rearing 
of  three  children  to  any  pair  there  will  be 
required  from  ten  to  twelve  years,  and  an- 
other ten  to  bring  them  through  the  period 
of  adolescence,  years  in  which  society  must 
stand  by  to  see  that  the  peace  and  security 
of  the  woman  are  not  jeopardised  on  any 
light  occasion. 

171 


LOVE   AND   THE   SOUL   MAKER 

Most  of  the  modern  regulations  of  mar- 
riage are  in  the  nature  of  a  guarantee  that 
they  shall  not  be  so  jeopardised.  They  have 
sprung  up  in  the  interests  of  society  which 
forbids  that  the  children  of  any  union  shall 
be  lightly  thrust  back  upon  society  for  sup- 
port. Quite  as  much  they  have  sprung  up 
in  answer  to  the  need  of  parents  to  be  braced 
from  without;  for  the  adventure  of  the 
family  is  one  in  which  arise  many  occasions 
for  the  adventurers  to  lean  hard  upon  the 
bond  that  binds  them  to  the  undertaking, 
and  need  to  feel  its  indissoluble  quality.  It 
is  not  alone  in  the  strength  of  the  perform- 
ers that  great  things  are  accomplished,  but 
in  the  strength  of  us  all. 

Valda  began  to  be  apprehensive. 

"If  you  are  going  to  say  that  children  are 
an  excuse  for  living  together  when  there  is 
no  other  reason  for  it,"  she  warned,  swell- 
ing with  modern  revolt  against  the  endless 
172 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

chain  of  transmission  as  a  human  objective, 
"I  shan't  agree  with  you." 

"I  shouldn't  in  that  case  be  agreeing  with 
myself,"  I  conceded.  "If  there's  a  bigger 
thing  than  children  to  draw  man  to  woman, 
there's  a  more  compelling  thing,  if  it  ar- 
rives, to  drive  them  asunder." 

"You  admit,  then,  that  there  are  reasons 
why  marriage  need  not  inevitably  be  per- 
manent?" 

"I  admit,"  I  said,  "a  reason." 


VIII 

ALL  the  things  that  marriage  ought 
not  to  do  for  us  may  be  gathered 
under  the  one  head  of  not  discred- 
iting our  social  values.  This  is  the  sole  cri- 
terion of  particular  marriages  with  which 
society  has  any  concern — are  the  parties  to 
it  worth  more  or  less  to  us?  What  goes  on 
within  the  relation,  by  what  modes,  what 
vital  play  of  personalities,  the  human  factor 
is  raised  to  its  most  serviceable  exponent 
we  have  not  even  to  question.  But  we  may, 
and  must,  question  the  result  as  it  is  re- 
turned to  us  in  terms  of  social  service. 

Nature  has  experimented  with  matings  a 
thousand  ways  across  the  field  of  life; 
welded  the  essential  elements  in  one,  di- 
vided them,  united  them  in  ephemeral 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

tragedy,  swept  the  respective  instruments 
apart  through  wider  and  wider  ranges  of 
unmatched  experience,  brought  them  to- 
gether for  longer  and  more  complicated 
contacts.  And  through  it  all  the  one  deter- 
mining process  which  we  perceive,  though 
the  end  escapes  us,  is  betterment.  The  Soul 
Maker  has  matched  love  and  death  and  love 
and  happiness ;  but  neither  death  nor  pleas- 
ure has  been  anything  more  than  the  pre- 
ferred instrument.  It  does  not  become  us, 
then,  to  elevate  happiness  to  a  degree  beyond 
the  eternal  mark.  It  is  important  only  to 
the  extent  that  it  raises  the  personal  key. 
We  are  entitled  to  as  much  of  it  as  permits 
us  to  make  our  contribution  at  its  highest, 
but  we  are  not  entitled  to  it  on  any  other 
grounds.  The  augmenting  power  of  happi- 
ness in  the  plane  of  human  endeavour  is 
tremendous,  but  some  great  souls  have  been 
able  to  dispense  with  it  altogether. 
175 


\ 


NO 

\  I 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 


X' 


The  impossibility  of  standardising  the 
condition  called  happy  would  alone  estab- 

y     — 

1  lish  its  insufficiency  as  a  social  criterion  of 
marriage.  It  means  too  often  that  combi- 
nation of  circumstances  which  favours  our 
weakness,  ministers  to  our  vanity  and  asks 
no  embarrassing  questions.  It  means  some- 
times the  accidental  avoidance  of  distress- 
ing incidents,  accidents  of  sickness,  death, 
poverty,  which  may  lie  wholly  without  the 
sphere  of  personal  control.  It  may  mean, 
for  a  woman,  being  maintained  at  a  given 
economic  status;  it  has  meant  for  men  to 
maintain  themselves  at  an  unbroken  level 
of  male  egotism. 

One  way  or  another,  half  stated,  over- 
stated, instinctively  -felt  for  without  being 
stated  at  all,  an  idea  of  a  higher  objective  in 
marriage  than  personal  satisfaction,  has  col- 
oured all  our  judgments  of  marriage  in  gen- 
eral. It  has  been  the  one  argument  which 
176 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

has  sustained  itself  from  generation  to  gen- 
eration, in  the  long  struggle  over  the  seques- 
tration of  woman.  Re  ?traint  has  been  con- 
doned on  the  ground  i1iat  it  enhanced  the 
quality  of  her  racial  contribution.  She  has 
been  held  to  be  recompensed  for  her  with- 
drawal from  community  activity  by  what 
she  has  thereby  added  to  her  husband's  per- 
sonal index.  The  idea  of  social  equivalence 
has  been,  and  is  still,  the  sole  extenuation  of 
the  great  passions  of  romance.  What  is 
needed  now  is  to  bring  it  home  to  the  par- 
ticular instance  as  the  one  determining  con- 
dition of  successful  mating.  "For  better  or 
worse"  in  the  marriage  service  was  intended 
to  emphasise  the  spiritual  values  of  mar- 
riage by  making  it  superior  to  things,  but 
no  one  has  a  right  to  become  worse  by  mar- 
riage. The  eternal  debt  which  man  owes 
to  society  is  himself;  he  cannot  give  him- 
self wholly  away,  even  to  the  lovely  lady, 
177 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

nor  is  woman  to  be  wholly  had  for  the  ask- 
ing. Marriage  between  the  two  who  enter- 
tain it  is  a  sex  question;  between  them  and 
the  community  it  is  a  question  of  social  ef- 
ficiency. 


In  view  of  the  incompetence  of  our  mat- 
ing methods,  even  with  the  best  intention, 
it  is  unavoidable  that  many  marriages 
should  fail  of  permanence.  It  is  even 
desirable.  No  one  has  the  effrontery  to  con- 
tend that  marriages  which  produce  crimi- 
nals, degenerates,  drunkards,  epileptics, 
have  any  social  right  of  continuance.  From 
no  quarter  is  there  opposition  to  the  dissolu- 
tion of  any  union  which  makes  of  a  clean, 
strong  woman  a  contaminated  and  contam- 
inating wreck.  We  go  so  far  in  our  appre- 
ciation of  the  social  menace  of  such  matings 
as  to  undertake  to  legislate  against  their  in- 
178 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

ception.  We  can  go  further,  and  by  rational 
prevision  of  marriage  do  much  to  obviate 
the  social  waste  of  weariness  and  disgust, 
of  sensuality  and  selfishness,  of  opposing 
aims  and  irreconcilable  standards.  But  the 
limits  of  human  foreknowledge  make  it  im- 
probable that  mating  will  ever  be  uniformly 
successful  at  every  attempt.  The  time  will 
come  when  the  notion  that  such  mating  mis- 
adventure should  be  pronounced  incurable 
will  rank  with  the  superstition  which  made 
an  impiety  of  enlightened  surgery. 

4 

What  is  necessary  to  establish  the  social 
criterion  of  divorce  is  a  revision  of  our 
whole  way  of  looking  at  it.  It  is  assumed 
now  as  an  infringement  of  a  code;  it  is 
undertaken  in  the  same  spirit  and  before 
the  same  tribunal  as  a  criminal  offence. 
What  it  should  really  be  is  an  inquiry  into 
179 


LOVE   AND   THE   SOUL   MAKER 

the  advisability  of  two  people  continuing 
to  live  together.  Instead  of  a  judge  to  ren- 
der decisions  in  accordance  with  law,  there 
should  be  a  commission  of  marital  welfare. 

Divorce  is  an  evidence  of  failure  to  which 
society  is  an  accessory,  nine  times  out  of  ten 
more  culpable  than  either  of  the  unhappy 
parties.  It  is  important  that  society  should 
be  fully  informed,  should  not  be  allowed  to 
escape  complete  knowledge  of  the  cause  and 
occasion  of  such  failure.  Social  conditions 
tending  widely  to  disrupt  families  deserve 
at  least  as  much  social  consideration  as  the 
hookworm  or  the  city  sewers. 

For  this  reason  alone  divorce  should 
be  simple;  stripped  of  every  inducement 
to  conceal  the  true  grounds  in  favour 
of  a  particular  legal  quibble  which  the 
parties  have  agreed  upon  will  get  them  off 
safeliest  with  the  court.  Not  even  the  gen- 
erous impulse  of  right  thinking  people  to 
1 80 


LOVE   AND   THE   SOUL   MAKER 

obtain  divorce  by  the  method  which  will 
leave  the  other  least  damned  by  it  should 
enter  here;  nor  the  other  equally  human 
impulse  which  would  leave  the  offending 
party  as  much  damned  by  it  as  possible. 

Divorce  should  be  easy  of  access;  ap- 
proachable as  soon  as  it  becomes  desir- 
able, not  delayed  until  some  flagrant  of- 
fence involves  the  mismated  pair  in  mutual 
accusation  and  recrimination.  Whatever 
the  process,  it  should  not  be  of  a  character! 
that  requires  "working  up"  to — the  creation 
of  hysterical  states  as  an  anodyne  to  the  so- 
cial reprobation  which  must  now  be  under- 
gone on  the  way  to  freedom. 

And  the  first  step  toward  the  reform  of 
our  methods  of  divorce  should  be  the  aboli- 
tion of  newspaper  publicity.  The  dissolu- 
tion of  a  marriage  should  be,  in  respect  to 
the  parties  to  it,  as  private  as  a  surgical  op- 
eration. In  respect  to  its  social  aspects,  as 
181 


LOVE   AND   THE   SOUL   MAKER 

accessible  as  the  report  of  the  census.  For 
there  is  no  better  test  for  the  validity  of  any 
given  social  condition  than  its  reaction  upon 
the  integrity  of  marriage. 

In  the  recently  established  Court  of  Do- 
mestic Relations  we  have  the  beginnings  of 
a  proper  tribunal;  but  it  should  have  been 
named  Domestic  Adjustments,  for  what  its 
transactions  have  revealed  is  that,  more  than 
in  any  other  department  of  life,  we  have 
been  thinking  of  marriage  in  terms  of  a 
class.  Our  attitude  toward  it  has  largely 
been  determined  by  the  notion  of  a  kind  of 
sanctity  of  the  personal  experience.  Inter- 
ference and  compulsion  from  the  outside, 
say  the  ideal  makers,  are  impossible,  since 
the  very  act  of  appeal  to  such  outside  com- 
pulsion means  the  destruction  of  the  bond. 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  the  Court  of  Domes- 
tic Relations,  with  the  aid  of  a  probation 
officer,  mends  about  as  many  marriages  as 
182 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

the  civil  court  dissolves.  Nothing  is  so  cer- 
tain as  that  a  great  many  matings  fail  be- 
cause the  parties  to  them  know  nothing 
about  marriage,  not  even  their  own;  and, 
though  it  is  not  to  be  learned  in  the  same 
schools,  it  is  just  as  possible  for  a  third  per- 
son to  know  what  is  radically  wrong  be- 
tween you  and  your  husband  as  between  the 
left  lobe  of  your  brain  and  your  motor  im- 
pulses. In  all  the  ages  that  men  and  wom- 
en have  been  living  together  and  rearing 
children,  a  few  things  have  transpired 
which  should  be  as  much  a  part  of  the  gen- 
eral knowledge  as  the  rule  for  long  division. 
Yet  it  is  written  large  in  the  proceedings 
of  the  Court  of  Domestic  Relations  that 
marriages  fail  on  every  hand  for  want  of 
just  such  time  stamped  certainties. 

Nothing  in  the  proceedings  of  such  courts, 
taken  with  the  tribunal  for  juvenile  delin- 
quents, has  been  more  illuminating  than  the 
183 


LOVE   AND   THE   SOUL   MAKER 

total  failure  of  our  religious  and  educa- 
tional systems  to  provide  any  reliable  cri- 
terion for  the  masses  in  the  business  of  living 
together.  It  is  possible  in  New  York  for 
parents  to  provide  their  children  with  any 
variety  of  free  medical  attention,  to  have 
them  taught  the  violin  and  hand  embroid- 
ery, or  to  secure  at  the  public  expense  train- 
ing which  will  enable  them  to  make  a  liv- 
ing on  the  vaudeville  circuit.  But  they  can- 
not obtain  for  themselves  advice  or  assist- 
ance in  the  most  important  relation  in  life, 
except  by  application  to  a  court  which  is 
compelled  to  regard  such  application  as  the 
public  confession  of  offence.  It  is  this  ele- 
ment of  publicity  and  reprobation  which 
renders  the  resort  of  unhappy  people  to  the 
courts  unlikely  until  the  trouble  has  reached 
the  acute,  and  possibly  incurable,  stage. 
Privacy  and  simplicity  are  the  absolute  con- 
ditions to  be  insisted  upon  in  any  effective 
184 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

dealing  with  the  social  evil  of  disintegrat- 
ing marriages.  The  whole  ground  of  our 
estimate  of  divorce  proceedings  must  be 
shifted  from  the  implication  of  offence  to 
the  more  hopeful  one  of  falling  short. 
Fruitful,  life-long  mating  is  an  ideal  which 
is  to  be  tried  for  under  conditions  which 
will  render  the  failure  to  attain  it  something 
less  than  discreditable.  No  human  relation 
can  long  maintain  itself  with  dignity  that 
does  not  permit  the  possibility  of  going  out 
of  it  erectly. 


Valda  was  divided  between  the  suspicions 
that,  though  air  this  was  very  advanced,  it 
was  also  likely  to  prove  very  upsetting. 

"It  destroys,"  she  concluded,  "nearly  all 
the  admitted  grounds  for  divorce,  even  the 
most  ancient." 

So  far  as  an  isolated  act  may  constitute 
1851 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

"grounds"  it  does;  but  in  its  implications, 
in  the  violence  it  does  to  the  essential  rela- 
tion, in  its  capacity  for  rendering  the  union 
inutile,  almost  any  act  might  be  a  good 
ground,  or  none  at  all. 

The  true  objective  of  divorce  is  not  the 
dissolution  of  particular  marriages,  but  the 
establishment  of  the  highest  possible 
grounds  upon  which  people  may  continue  to 
live  together.  The  relief  it  affords  is  of  an 
extremely  limited  character,  since,  while  it 
frequently  makes  way  for  another  and  hap- 
pier marriage,  the  scars  and  ruptures  of 
such  social  surgery  would  tend  to  unfit  one 
for  the  happiest. 

The  two  elements  of  mate-love  which 
form  the  basis  of  institutionalised  marriage 
are  intention  and  potential  permanence.  In 
so  far  as  either  of  these  is  imperilled  by 
voluntary  acts,  society  is  concerned  with 
them.  But  we  must  deal  with  facts  rather 
186 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

than  ideals;  all  about  us  marriages  are 
maintaining  high  standards  of  efficiency 
under  conditions  not  at  all  in  harmony  with 
our  personal  predilections.  What  we  have 
to  ask,  then,  confronted  with  a  specific  oc- 
casion which  does  not  fall  in  with  our  no- 
tion of  what  marriage  ought  to  be,  is  not  in 
what  wise  it  fails  to  conform,  but  to  what 
extent  it  threatens  the  permanence  of  the  tie 
or  the  quality  of  its  intention? 

All  successful  marriage  is  in  the  nature  of 
an  achievement;  whether  it  is  done  at  white 
heat  by  the  transmutation  of  personality  in 
passion,  or  nobly  reinforced  by  the  intelli- 
gence and  the  will,  it  represents  a  series  of 
progressions.  Every  new  phase  of  parent- 
hood and  mutual  adjustment  has  its  sepa- 
rate unfoldment. 

By  the  element  of  intention  I  mean  the 
will  to  hold  fast  through  every  phase  to  the 
uttermost  that  marriage  can  do  for  us. 
187 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

Without  it  marriage  becomes  a  futile  and 
foolish  affair  and  ourselves  mere  puppets 
of  inclination.  It  must  be  borne  in  mind 
that,  so  far,  life  has  not  proved  it  more  than 
a  happy  accident  that  some  marriages  pro- 
ceed to  their  ultimate  goal  without  apparent 
effort.  It  happens,  but  it  does  not  happen 
often  enough  to  justify  us  in  establishing 
it  as  a  standard.  What  is  more  likely  from 
the  evidence  at  hand  is  that  love  which 
must  occasionally  be  defended  from  our 
weaknesses  does  rather  more  for  us. 

It  follows,  therefore,  that  ground  for  dis- 
solution of  a  marriage  cannot  be  based  upon 
specific  acts.  Particular  unions  may  fail 
and  fall  apart  before  occasions  which  by 
others  will  be  triumphantly  survived.  Any 
condition  which  renders  the  marriage  a  so- 
cial menace,  such  as  the  discovery  of  taints 
certain  to  prove  prejudicial  to  the  young, 
should  call  for  annulment  on  demand.  But 
188 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

offences  of  one  party  against  the  other  can 
scarcely  be  categorised. 

Failure  to  provide  cannot  be  argued  ex- 
cept under  conditions  which  render  it  diffi- 
cult or  unwise  for  the  wife  to  provide  for 
herself.  In  so  far  as  men  commit  them- 
selves to  a  state  of  society  in  which  the  self- 
supporting  labour  of  women  fails  of  its  due 
appreciation,  they  are  bound  to  make  sup- 
port an  item  of  marital  obligation ;  but  there 
is  no  natural  excuse  for  it  other  than  the  pre- 
occupation of  the  woman  with  the  bearing 
and  rearing  of  children. 

Neither  can  infidelity  as  an  unrelated  act 
be  accepted  as  valid  ground  of  social  com- 
pulsion. Not  at  least  so  long  as  society  com- 
mits itself  to  the  manner  in  which  the  act  is 
historically  conditioned.  It  is  in  its  reac- 
tions upon  the  relation  which  it  affronts 
that  its  offensiveness  consists. 

Whenever  unfaith  appreciably  weakens 
189 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

the  spiritual  quality  of  an  existing  tie,  in  as 
much  as  it  involves  either  party  in  new  and 
conflicting  responsibilities  of  parenting  and 
maintenance,  it  becomes  a  consideration  of 
the  Commission  of  Marital  Welfare.  The 
disturbances  of  the  maternal  function  inci- 
dental to  jealousy  and  doubt,  constitute  a 
practical  objection.  Chief  of  the  requisites 
for  successful  mothering  is  stability. 

Sex  relations  must  serve  the  purpose  of 
sex.  That  is  to  say  they  must  serve  eternal, 
racial  purposes.  All  human  experience 
goes  to  show  that,  whenever  they  are  made 
to  serve  other  or  temporary  exigencies,  the 
result  is  racial  deterioration.  The  supposi- 
tion, loudly  insisted  upon  in  some  quarters 
that,  when  the  two  doors  of  exit  and  en- 
trance to  marriage  are  both  of  them  wide 
open,  nobody  will  go  in  or  out  of  them  for 
any  reason  except  love,  is  made  without 
knowledge.  The  more  complex  civilisa- 
190 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

tion  becomes,  the  more  likely  people  are  to 
be  led  into  sex  relations  as  into  any  other 
from  motives  of  private  gain,  as  a  relief 
from  boredom  or  temporary  want.  Time 
out  of  mind,  men  have  used  sex  influences 
for  purposes  of  social  and  political  ambi- 
tion, or  to  prey  upon  one  another  for  food 
and  entertainment. 

It  is  not  therefore  as  an  act  that  infidelity 
comes  under  the  ban,  but  in  as  much  as  its 
occurrence  betrays  the  marriage  as  lacking 
in  the  true  racial  mark.  It  constitutes  a 
denial  of  the  element  of  intention  in  the  par- 
ticular instance.  To  admit  relations  with- 
out intention  is  to  open  the  way  to  mar- 
riages in  which  mate-love  is  a  secondary 
item  or  not  an  item  at  all. 


It  is  not  however  on  the  grounds  of  di- 
vorce that  public  opinion  is   acutely  di- 
191 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

vided.  Marriages  in  which  the  unsatisfac- 
tory elements  can  be  reduced  to  "com- 
plaints" are  in  some  fashion  remediable.  It 
is  around  the  problem  of  dissolving  the 
marriage  which  has  failed  of  no  visible  con- 
dition but  only  of  its  vitalising  spark  that 
argument  is  locked. 

The  right  of  society  to  exercise  restraint 
upon  the  too  casual  dissolution  of  marriage 
is  conceded  in  the  degree  that  we  are  com- 
mitted to  the  social  control  of  the  mating 
impulse.  The  purpose  of  marriage  being 
conceived  of  as  racial  as  well  as  personal, 
the  urgency  with  which  it  is  desired  and 
the  reasons  named  for  its  discontinuance 
must  take  their  place  not  as  prime  causes, 
but  as  factors  establishing  the  probable 
result  It  is  not  what  leads  up  to  the 
demand  for  divorce,  with  which  society  is 
directly  concerned,  but  what  is  to  flow  from 
it 

192 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

Those  who  admit  divorce  at  all  are  will- 
ing to  agree  to  it  when  both  parties  can 
demonstrate  a  loss  of  social  values.  What 
they  balk  at  is  the  opening,  which  any  free- 
dom of  divorce  allows,  to  the  possibility  of 
its  being  thrust  upon  us.  It  has  taken  cen- 
turies of  experience  to  realise  the  affront  to 
the  Soul  Maker  in  marriages  enforced;  in 
truth,  but  a  small  part  of  the  world  has 
learned  it.  Here  in  our  quarter  of  it  we 
are  blinking  the  whole  problem  of  divorce 
in  the  effort  not  to  be  brought  face  to  face 
with  the  legal  violations  of  a  marriage 
which,  for  one  party,  is  still  answering  the 
soul's  extremest  need.  This  is  the  point 
about  which  we  beat  with  a  great  flourish 
of  noise  and  false  faces,  like  an  ancient  Chi- 
nese army.  Women,  who  defend  them- 
selves by  instinct  and  without  organisation, 
go  trailing  wings  about  it  in  every  direc- 
tion but  the  one  in  which  lies  the  crucial  ar- 
193 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

gument.  Divorce  for  a  cause  or  no  divorce 
at  all  were  a  simpler  matter  than  the  social 
determination  of  a  relation  in  which  one  or 
the  other  of  the  two  protestants  must  suffer 
immense  and  irreparable  damage. 


Chiefest  and  most  overblown  of  the  argu- 
ments flourished  before  the  citadel  is  the 
institution  of  the  family.  Not  only  is  di- 
vorce supposed  to  operate  against  the  par- 
ticular family,  but  it  is  held  that  any  in- 
crease of  facility  will  tend  to  undermine  the 
security  of  the  family  in  general.  All  of 
which  rests  on  the  unargued  assumption 
that  the  family  is  an  institution,  and  that 
the  whole  fabric  of  civilisation  rests  upon  it. 

The  relation  of  parents  and  children  in  a 

disrupted  marriage  is  undoubtedly  one  of 

its  acute  problems.    The  right  of  the  child 

to  the  care  and  love  of  both  parents,  the 

194 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

likelihood  that  the  parents  with  a  full 
knowledge  of  the  child's  heredity  will  prove 
the  best  guides  for  it,  are  considerations 
which  enter  so  deeply  into  the  particular 
problem  that  very  few  people  will  be  found 
to  undertake  divorce  except  after  having 
given  these  points  their  utmost  considera- 
tion. 

Theoretically,  the  protestants  should 
make  any  sacrifice  of  themselves  to  preserve 
the  due  environment  of  the  child.  Actually, 
complete  immolation  of  the  parents  does  not 
invariably  work  out  to  the  advantage  of  the 
offspring.  The  lack  of  standardisation  of 
parental  influence,  still  more  the  lack  of 
reliable  data  as  to  its  value  in  the  child's 
life,  prevent  us  from  doing  any  more  than 
merely  making  it  out  as  a  most  serious  con- 
sideration. At  best  the  problem  of  the 
children  must  always  be  a  particular  prob- 
lem; but  the  argument  for  the  preservation 
195 


of  the  family  as  an  institution  rests  under 
no  such  disability. 

§ 

The  coherence  of  the  mating  pair  and 
their  offspring  is  a  natural  animal  grouping 
common  to  the  higher  species.  It  endures 
ordinarily  through  the  dependency  of  the 
young;  in  man  it  is  continued  beyond  this 
natural  period  by  affection  and  self-inter- 
est. 

The  effort  of  the  Soul  Maker  to  empha- 
sise the  family  tie  by  prolonging  the  period 
of  dependency  in  human  young,  seems  to 
say  that  there  is  something  to  be  got  out  of 
this  binding  of  the  consanguineous  group 
not  collectible  from  the  purely  social  or- 
ganisation. But,  when  we  think  modernly 
of  the  family,  we  assume  it  to  mean  those 
consanguineous  members  who  live  under 
one  roof,  with  one  common  source  of  sup- 
port; thus  by  our  ordinary  speech  betraying 
196 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

that  the  constituting  fact  of  the  family  is 
not  kinship  but  property.  A  man's  family 
are  those  of  his  blood  who  may  inherit  his 
houses  and  lands. 

Originally  the  term  was  wider,  more  sin- 
cere. It  was  used  to  define  a  group  gath- 
ered about  one  dominant  male,  or  occasion- 
ally even  about  a  woman,  and  consisted  of 
wives,  concubines  and  their  children,  slaves 
and  hirelings.  Its  principle  of  coherence 
was  admittedly  protective  and  industrial. 
Some  semblance  of  this  ancient  group  still 
survives  in  countries  where  the  industrial 
conditions  make  it  necessary,  or  where 
property,  raised  almost  to  a  degree  of  sanc- 
tity, is  preserved  intact  from  generation  to 
generation.  But  everywhere  the  condition 
of  inheritability  is  the  determining  one.  An 
individual  adopted  into  a  family  by  a  legal 
process  becomes  a  more  integral  part  of  it 
than  the  direct  descendants  born  outside  the 
197 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

bond.  Not  a  man's  son,  not  even  the  first- 
born, is  a  member  of  his  family  should  his 
mother  have  neglected  the  legal  formality 
which  makes  him  an  heir.  The  woman  her- 
self, though  she  give  children,  passion,  ser- 
vice, does  not  herself  by  that  alone  become 
a  member  of  an  institution  we  are  occasion- 
ally moved  to  describe  as  sacred. 

But  there  are  other  ways,  beside  the  con- 
spicuous and  cruel  neglect  of  illegitimate 
children,  in  which  the  preservation  of  the 
"family"  is  rendered  ridiculous  as  an  argu- 
ment against  a  possible  neglect  of  the  legiti- 
mate through  divorce.  For  there  is  no  evi- 
dence in  history  that  society  has  ever  cared 
for  the  family  at  all ;  it  has  cared  only  for 
particular  families,  propertied  families, 
those  of  our  race,  our  moral  status. 

We  have  never  hesitated  to  break  up  a 
family  when  one  member  of  it  has  incurred 
the  deep  displeasure  of  society  by  what,  at 
198 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

the  particular  historic  period,  is  known  as  a 
felony;  there  have  been  times  when  we  have 
done  it  for  the  theft  of  a  loaf  of  bread.  It 
is  done  still  in  some  countries  on  a  pretext 
as  slight  as  a  political  opinion.  There  are 
people  living  in  America  who  can  remem- 
ber seeing  whole  families  broken  up  and 
sold  like  cattle  because  they  happened  to  be 
of  an  unfortunate  colour.  We  carried  our 
inconsistency  at  that  time  so  far  that  we  even 
permitted  the  sacrament  of  religion  to  mat- 
ings  which  were  afterward  violated  to  meet 
the  financial  exigencies  of  the  dominant 
race. 

It  is  only  recently  that  we  have  come  to 
such  an  appreciation  of  the  value  of  the 
family  that  we  are  realising  the  social  waste 
involved  in  allowing  a  particular  family  to 
be  broken  up  by  the  accidental  death  of  the 
breadwinner.  Until  the  last  two  or  three 
years  we  had  no  provision  other  than  pri- 
199 


LOVE  AND  THE  SOUL  MAKER 

vate  charity  against  this,  the  most  common 
cause  of  dissolution.  The  maintenance  of 
widows  with  dependent  children  out  of  the 
common  fund  is  the  first  definite  step  to- 
ward placing  the  family  in  the  position  of 
prime  importance  which  we  theoretically 
assume  for  it.  We  still  consistently  neglect 
the  two  greatest  factors  operating  against 
the  continuity  of  family  ties — war  and  pov- 
erty. War  is  a  two-edged  sword  cutting 
both  ways  into  family  life ;  it  decimates  and 
prevents.  Poverty  is  a  disease,  gnawing  al- 
ways at  the  props  of  life. 

Prevalent  as  divorce  threatens  to  become 
here  in  America,  it  does  not  yet  so  much 
menace  the  family  as  does  the  forcing  of 
bearing  mothers  into  mills  and  factories. 
The  possibility  of  it  does  not  lie  so  heavily 
on  the  soul  of  mate-love  as  a  long,  steady 
fall  in  wages.  So  long  as  society  passes  over 
in  indifference  or  silence  these  two  great 
200 


LOVE  AND  THE  SOUL  MAKER 

deterrents  of  family  efficiency,  it  cannot 
with  any  success  raise  the  standard  of  the 
family  against  any  proposed  changes  in  the 
prevailing  modes  of  marriage. 

The  family  still  does,  in  a  material  way, 
what  it  can  for  its  young;  but  there  is  a 
growing  feeling  that  the  young  should  not 
be  left  at  the  mercy  of  the  family  whenever 
it  fails  of  a  certain  minimum  standard.  Ac- 
tually no  man  educates  his  young  indepen- 
dently, nor  medicines  them  when  they  are 
ill,  nor  teaches  them  his  trade.  Rather,  the 
whole  movement  at  present  is  toward  the 
familisation  of  the  state,  an  ideal  to  which 
any  emphasis  of  the  consanguineous  group 
is  opposed.  The  wide  conviction  of  the  in- 
advisability  of  inheritable  wealth  strikes  at 
the  one  point  which  made  the  institutional- 
isation  of  the  family  possible,  and  tends 
still  more  to  restrict  its  social  service  to  the 
uses  of  affection. 

201 


LOVE    AND   THE    SOUL    MAKER 

It  is  probable  that  these  have  been  greatly 
underestimated.  Love  is  a  force,  not  only 
between  man  and  woman  but  between  par- 
ent and  young.  It  is  the  catalyser  of  the 
constituents  of  personality.  It  plays  an  un- 
deniable, but  not  clearly  determined,  part  in 
physical  vitalisation.  Unlicked  lambs  will 
die,  and  babies  require  to  be  held  and  com- 
forted. Almost  any  kind  of  parent  is  bet- 
ter than  an  institution  for  very  young  chil- 
dren. 

We  do  not  know  enough  of  these  things  to 
speak  with  authority,  but  we  know  enough 
to  be  certain  that  the  element  of  divorce 
which  renders  it  a  grave  social  considera- 
tion, is  not  the  violence  it  does  to  a  legalised 
institution,  but  to  the  affectional  life  of  chil- 
dren. 

This  is  at  least  a  simplification.  We  must 
keep  the  rules  of  the  game,  even  with  our 
sons  and  daughters.  Fair  play  forbids  that 
202 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

we  should  rob  them  of  their  prerogative  in 
the  interests  of  personal  passion. 

"You  mean,"  Valda  questioned,  "that  we 
mustn't  deprive  them  of  the  chances  of  nat- 
ural affection  for  the  sake  of  a  happier  re- 
lation for  ourselves?" 

"Not  when  such  relation  is  the  sole  ob- 
jective of  divorce.  When  we  have  elected 
to  serve  the  race  with  children,  we  are  at 
least  obligated  during  the  period  of  their 
dependence,  to  see  them  through,  even  if  it 
should  involve  the  temporary  submergence 
of  our  own  sex  life.  Love  is  important  to 
life;  so  much  so  that  it  cannot  fairly  be 
sought  at  the  expense  of  the  love-life  of 
others." 

Valda  sat  a  long  time  without  lifting  her 
eyes  from  the  green  reflections  in  the  water 
that  slipped  so  mindlessly  over  the  polished 
pebbles  of  the  brook,  and  when  at  last  she 
did  so  I  saw  that  what  she  had  been  seeing 
203 


LOVE   AND   THE   SOUL   MAKER 

there  were  some  of  the  reasons  why  I  had 
led  up  to  this  point  so  carefully,  and  why 
spoken  as  I  had  in  the  beginning  of  the  out- 
cry about  the  preservation  of  the  family,  as 
cover — a  screen  between  the  sore  issue  of 
the  subject  and  our  profoundest  human  ret- 
icencies. 


We  are  reticent  because  we  do  not  yet 
know  what  we  think  about  the  propriety  of 
divorce  by  compulsion.  If  divorce  is  to  be 
admitted  at  all,  it  cannot  be  denied  to  two 
people  both  of  whom  desire  it  and  have  al- 
ready satisfied  the  demand  of  society  as  to 
the  welfare  of  the  children.  But  when  it  is 
sought  by  one,  what  shall  be  done  for  the 
other  to  whom  it  is  the  stripping  of  the  tree 
of  life,  the  soul's  utmost  indignity?  To  a 
certainty  this  cannot  be  settled  by  opinion, 
still  less  by  the  opinion  of  the  few  who  write 
204 


LOVE    AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

of  it,  often  men  and  women  of  creative 
minds  in  whose  lives  sex  has  values  and  con- 
notations unknown  to  the  masses.  And  if 
not  settled  by  them,  assuredly  not  for  the  ar- 
ticulate few  without  reference  to  the  many 
in  whom  the  protest  of  nature  against  any 
defection  of  the  mate  is  as  violent,  and  pos- 
sibly as  instinctive,  as  against  compulsory 
mating. 

I  said  possibly,  as  a  concession  to  our  lack 
of  information ;  personally  I  believe  that  the 
tie  which  comes  into  being  in  the  exercise 
of  mate-love  is  real.  Women  believe  many 
things  about  love  which  they  need  no  sci- 
ence to  confirm  for  them,  and  lack  figures 
for  expressing  what  in  moments  of  blinding 
vision  is  perfectly  clear  to  me — that  there 
is  in  right  passion  a  welding  of  personali- 
ties that,  however  insensitive  it  may  become 
on  one  side  or  the  other,  can  never  be  done 
violence  to  without  working  serious  damage 
205 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

to  the  love-life  of  both  parties.  It  may 
wither  and  die  between  them,  but,  so  long 
as  on  one  side  or  the  other  it  throbs  with  the 
pulse  of  life,  any  rending  of  its  fibres  must 
be  felt  to  the  centre  of  vitality.  So  many  in- 
stances come  before  me,  as  I  write,  of  the 
working  of  this  hypothesis  that  I  am  re- 
strained from  offering  them  only  by  the  cer- 
tainty that  it  requires  more  than  one  life- 
time of  observing  to  establish  it.  I  record 
it  here  for  a  profound  personal  conviction 
which  time  may  witness  to  us.  But  if  I  ad- 
mit that  the  damage  to  the  one  who  goes,  in 
any  partial  failure  of  the  bond,  is  not  wholly 
proven,  the  injury  to  the  one  who  is  left  is 
in  quite  another  category. 


Violence  to  the  love-life  of  women  is 
likely  to  be  the  occasion  of  more  serious  so- 
206 


LOVE   AND   THE   SOUL   MAKER 

cial  loss  than  is  the  case  with  men.  Even 
in  its  most  joyous  hours  there  is  a  shadow 
cast  on  woman's  love  by  the  pain  of  bearing. 
She  is  bound  up  in  all  her  spiritual  progres- 
sions with  processes  of  physical  reorganisa- 
tion. Love  in  man  may  change  his  relation 
to  society,  but  in  women  it  changes  the 
woman. 

Probably  many  of  the  values  we  attach  to 
virginity  in  women  are  factitious.  They  de- 
rive from  an  earlier  feeling  of  property  in 
the  person  of  women,  and  have  to  do  with 
her  marketable  values.  But  there  is  no 
blinking  the  fact  that  an  experience  of  mar- 
riage and  maternity  extending  over  a  con- 
siderable period  of  her  life,  sensibly  lessens 
a  woman's  chances  of  entering  upon  a  sec- 
ond such  experience  successfully.  More- 
over there  are  possibilities,  incident  to 
child-bearing,  of  becoming  more  or  less  in- 
capacitated not  only  for  new  relations  but 
207 

^,.>         h£,^_?     .r/C      :/,^-* 
> 

'  ^.^! /;.--.-.  ~r/> .  I 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

for  independent,  self-supporting  life  on  her 
own  account 

More  serious  still  is  the  disappearance, 
through  marriage  alone  sometimes,  but  very 
widely  through  child-bearing,  of  those  sec- 
ondary sex  characteristics  which  are  the  ad- 
vertisement of  mating  fitness. 

Every  year  as  the  sun  climbs  up  the  zo- 
diac it  brings  back  to  tree  and  flower,  to  the 
bright  feathered  tribe,  to  antlered  buck  and 
spotted  doe,  the  efflorescence  of  mating 
power.  The  voice  of  the  forest  is  tuned  to 
song,  the  dance  begins,  love  is  made  anew 
for  every  creature  except  man. 

Not  only  does  nature  not  bring  back  to 
the  female  of  that  species  the  blossom  time, 
the  curving  lip,  the  unconscious  invitation 
of  the  eye,  but,  once  mating  is  accomplished, 
there  are  definite  psychological  tracts  which 
may  not  be  re-entered.  We  are  so  accus- 
tomed to  this,  we  associate  it  so  instinctively 
208 


,,/io 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

with  the  sobering  cares  of  housewifery  and 
the  dimming  effect  of  age,  that  we  fail  to 
realise  it  always  as  a  stupendous  biologic 
process.  To  the  primitive  woman  nature 
gave  but  one  mating  season;  and  all  that 
mating  fails  to  accomplish  to  cut  her  off 
from  any  revivification  of  its  characteristic 
phases  is  done  for  her  by  maternity.  There 
is  no  more  return  to  it  than  its  rosy  hour 
may  return  to  the  shed  petals  of  the  rose. 
We  must  look  steadily  at  this  if  we  would 
see  it  whole.  The  modern  chivalrous  re- 
spect for  all  maternity  as  a  racial  service 
can  be  traced  unbrokenly  to  the  plain  ani- 
mal recognition  of  it  as  a  natural  bar  to 
mating  solicitation.  Free  association  of  the 
married  of  both  sexes  is  made  possible  by 
something  deeper  than  a  conventional  re- 
spect for  a  legal  bond. 

It  is  not  the  vow  they  have  taken  that 
keeps  married  women  from  coquetry,  but 
209 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL    MAKER 

the  disposition  they  take  on  with  being 
rightly  married.  And  for  the  great  major- 
ity of  women  this  reorganisation  of  mating 
capacity  is  permanent.  They  may  marry 
a  second  time  for  companionship,  for  sup- 
port, or  for  the  mere  exercise  of  self-abnega- 
tion, interrupted  by  the  loss  of  the  mate,  but 
the  vast  majority  of  women  have  been,  and 
still  remain,  incapable  of  more  than  one  true 
mating. 

The  difficulty  about  getting  this  recog- 
nised as  an  important  item  in  considerations 
of  divorce  is  due  to  the  fact  that  in  the  nu- 
merically small  class  of  those  who  read 
books  about  sex,  or  write  them,  this  is  not 
the  case.  The  age-long  struggle  of  woman 
to  maintain  herself  by  means  of  the  effect 
she  produces  on  man  has  led  to  an  extension 
of  her  capacity  for  orienting  herself  in  the 
region  of  his  desires. 

She  has  learned  not  only  to  preserve  the 
210 


LOVE    AND    THE    SOUL    MAKER 

bloom  of  her  body  long  after  its  primitive 
term,  but  has  achieved  the  impossible  by 
safeguarding,  in  the  midst  of  surrender, 
some  untouched  surfaces.  In  particular  in- 
stances she  has  out-distanced  the  Soul 
Maker  and  set  for  our  daily  mark  what  was 
once  the  supreme,  fleeting  moment.  Which 
does  not  entitle  her,  however,  to  the  last 
word  in  establishing  the  general  code.  The 
increasing  number  of  women  to  whom  a 
break  in  marriage  would  not  spell  over- 
whelming disaster  does  not  diminish  the 
present  certainty  that  a  system  by  which  di- 
vorce could  be  secured  by  one  party  without 
respect  to  the  inclination  of  the  other,  would 
lead  to  enormous  social  waste  and  loss. 


What  we  have  here  is  the  groundwork  for 
placing  in  the  hands  of  woman  the  deter- 
mining voice  in  any  projected  divorce 

211 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

which  is  not  incited  by  offence  and  has  for 
its  objective  the  reorganisation  of  sex  rela- 
tions. The  love-life  of  women  is,  in  view  of 
their  potential  maternity,  of  more  impor- 
tance to  the  community  than  the  love-life  of 
men.  Now  and  then  there  has  arisen  across 
history  a  male  whose  gift  is  of  a  surpassing- 
ness  that  exceeds  the  social  worth  of  many 
inconsiderable  women  —  fortunately  the  sort 
of  women  exploited  by  men  of  genius  has 
almost  always  been  inconsiderable  —  but 
probably  any  competent  mother  of  children 
is  always  worth  the  sacrifice  of  an  average 
man.  This  is  a  point  so  generally  conceded 
by  the  average  man  himself  that  he  will 
make  us  no  trouble  about  it. 

Although  it  has  been  from  time  to  time 
overlaid  by  the  postulates  of  religion,  the 
criterion  of  social  worth  for  all  sex  rela- 
tions, whether  to  be  entered  upon  or  discon- 
tinued, has  prevailed  in  our  general  prac- 
212 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

tice.  The  final  question  which  we  have  put 
to  any  irregularity  of  any  notable  citizen  is, 
not  to  what  degree  it  conformed  to  the  mar- 
riage code  of  his  day,  but  to  what  extent  did 
it  make  good.  It  is  not  even,  how  much  did 
it  bring  him,  but  what  did  we  get  out  of  it. 
Immunity  from  reproach  is  purchased  by 
acceptable  contributions.  We  judge  our 
neighbours  of  today  by  conformity  or  uncon- 
formity, but  the  judgment  of  time  is  that 
any  sex  relation  which  adds  to  our  meagre 
human  equipment  is  moral,  and  by  as  much 
as  it  withdraws  from  the  general  fund  it 
constitutes  itself  immoral. 


"I  think  I  understand,"  Valda  admitted 
at  last.  "You  mean  that  more  things  than 
sex  enter  into  marriage,  and  that  these  have 
still  to  be  reckoned  with  even  after  sex  has 
ceased  to  be  an  active  agent  in  the  affair." 
213 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

"That,  too ;  but  even  more  I  mean  that,  so 
long  as  sex  is  an  active  agent  on  one  side  or 
the  other,  it  must  come  in  for  active  consid- 
eration. It  is  in,  since  love  is  not  so  easily 
done  away  with  by  the  saying  so ;  it  goes  on, 
even  when  wholly  disregarded  by  the  object 
of  it,  affecting  the  social  values  of  the  lover. 
Speaking  for  the  social  body,  I  give  due 
credence  to  your  statement  that  you  cannot 
continue  in  this  marriage  without  suffering 
personal  inconvenience,  but  if  the  condition 
of  your  going  out  be  that  the  other  member 
is  to  be  subject  to  personal  loss,  has  not  so- 
ciety a  right  to  determine  which  one  of  you 
it  will  have  upon  its  hands  in  a  damaged 
condition?  This,  I  take  it,  constitutes  the 
chief  right  of  society  to  a  voice  in  the  mat- 
ings  and  unmatings  of  our  kind,  the  fact  that 
we  have,  as  society,  to  put  up  with  the  re- 
sults." 

"You  think  that  a  criterion  of  love  can  be 
214 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

established  in  its  effect  on  our  personal  val- 
ues?" 

"If  you  assume  the  measure  of  value,  as 
nearly  as  we  can  discover  it,  to  be  harmoni- 
ous with  the  racial  purpose,  I  do. 

"It  is  the  only  test  I  have  for  anything. 
It  is  the  dividing  line  in  sex  behaviours  be- 
tween self-indulgence  and  self-realisation. 
We've  a  right  to  as  much  love  as  we  can 
work  up  into  the  stuff  of  a  superior  person- 
ality. Taking  anything  over  what  we  can 
give  back  in  some  form  or  other  to  the  so- 
cial sum  is  my  notion  of  sinning.  I'd  as 
soon  think  of  anybody  going  about  with  a 
crippled  love-life  as  with  a  maimed  body 
or  a  depleted  purse  in  the  interest  of  my 
private  gratification." 

Valda  sat  perfectly  still  with  her  face 
turned  away  from  me.  The  water  went  on 
garrulously  to  its  appointed  place,  the  king- 
fisher came  back  to  the  green  room  and  the 
215 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

leaves  of  the  rock  maple  stirred  with  the 
day's  deep  breathing  as  the  feathers  on  a 
breast. 

"I  suppose,"  she  said,  "that  they  manage 
by  not  thinking  of  it,"  and  I  knew  that  her 
.own  thought  was  on  the  man  who  had 
broken  her  for  the  sake  of  an  indulgence 
which,  if  it  had  been  expressed  in  terms  of 
money  or  ambition,  he  would  indignantly 
have  repudiated. 


IX 


I  KNEW  what  was  passing  in  my 
friend's  mind  because  at  the  back 
of  mine  was  running  like  the  stream 
under  the  arched  woodland  the  recollection 
of  a  talk  I  had  had  with  Valda's  lover  be- 
fore I  had  finally  surrendered  him  to  what- 
ever use  the  gods  have  for  the  men  of 
broken  faith.  It  had  been  an  interview 
charged  with  the  profound  irritation  of  be- 
ing brought  to  book  by  the  consequences  of 
a  situation  whose  primary  excuse  had  been 
that  it  was  not  expected  to  have  conse- 
quences, an  irritation  directed  not  so  much 
at  me  as  at  the  whole  annoying  tendency  of 
human  situations  to  continue  to  affect  our 
217 

J3         a./- 

Y'\~  <T "•/"'•>          '   •  W 


•  «..GXV.-  '  '   rfipL '- l- 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

lives  long  after  they  have  lost  interest  for 
us. 

His  sole  contention  was  that  he  had  loved 
Valda  and  now  no  longer  loved  her.  He 
had  initiated  the  relation,  as  I  knew,  on  the 
assumption  that  it  was  to  proceed  by  God's 
law  superiorly  to  man's,  and  my  disposition 
to  consider  the  god  in  the  case  as  something 
outside  of  and  much  more  imperative  than 
his  personal  inclination  was  the  source  of 
considerable  impatience.  The  statement 
that  I  couldn't  just  accept  the  change  in  his 
feelings  as  an  excuse  for  spoiling  my 
friend's  life,  had  been  met  with  the  amazed 
recoil  of  the  reformer,  invited  to  set  in  op- 
eration against  his  own  impulses  the  stric- 
tures he  has  pronounced  upon  personal  be- 
haviours toward  which  he  has  had  no  dis- 
position. The  part  which  I  wished  him  to 
play  in  order  that  Valda  might  get  out  of 
the  situation  without  irreparable  damage, 
218 


r 


LOVE    AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

involved  restraints  and  repressions  the  mere 
idea  of  which  occasioned  in  him  much  the 
same  sort  of  pained  astonishment  with 
which  the  "business  interests"  had  received 
his  recent  exposures  of  certain  customary 
procedures  of  trade.  It  would  have 
evinced,  he  was  sure,  a  higher  magnanimity 
in  Valda  if  she  had  refused  to  let  considera- 
tion of  her  own  happiness  interfere  with 
his. 

Almost  as  much,  I  conceded,  as  if  he  had 
refrained  from  letting  his  happiness  inter- 
fere with  hers.  What  I  really  wished  to 
know  was,  since  one  of  them  must  be  sacri- 
ficed, on  what  ground  he  had  decided  that 
Valda  should  be  the  one? 

"What  it  comes  to,"  I  insisted,  "is  that,  in 
the  failure  of  any  sex  relation,  you  propose 
to  visit  all  the  inconvenience  on  the  faith- 
ful, the  deeply  loving."  I  was  sure  that 
was  exactly  what  he  meant  because  I 
219 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

couldn't  get  him  to  agree  to  it  in  so  many 
words.  He  talked  instead  of  the  high  and 
sacred  nature  of  passion,  and  of  the  impos- 
sibility of  bringing  it  under  any  sort  of  per- 
sonal control.  Restraint  was  for  emotions 
like  envy  or  greed  of  money  or  love  of 
power;  it  was  indispensable  to  be  put  in 
force  against  persons  of  a  strongly  execu- 
tive tendency  who  by  the  exercise  of  such 
gifts  might  become  bosses  or  even  capital- 
ists. But  restraint  of  the  love  impulses !  It 
was  plain  to  be  seen  that  his  intolerance  of 
my  position  was  subdued  only  by  a  due  re- 
gard for  my  limitations.  Love,  he  insisted, 
is  indispensably  and  eternally  free. 

"Yes;  but  for  Valda— how?" 

I  didn't  expect  any  answer  to  that.  There 
isn't  any.  All  women  know  that  once  a 
woman  has  given  herself  to  love  she  is  never 
again  entirely  free.  Therefore  I  was  not 
unprepared  for  the  diversion  attempted  by 
220 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

insisting  that  if  she  truly  loved  him  she 
would  wish  to  see  him  happy  even  at  the 
price  of  pain,  nor  did  I  think  it  worth  while 
to  explain  that  he  had  made  this  impossible 
by  his  attempt  to  thrust  the  price  upon  her. 
There  is  a  place  past  all  the  boundaries  of 
self  where  love  may  work  the  dissolving 
miracle  and  make  us  free  indeed,  but  it  is 
not  reached  by  methods  of  the  Reactionist. 
If  Valda  had  seen  him  make  a  fight  for  her, 
if  she  had  found  him  holding  faith  in  the 
teeth  of  reluctant  nature,  she  would  have 
arisen  on  swift  wings.  Even  if  it  were  worth 
while  hurting  yourself  very  much  for  one 
who  is  willing  you  should  be  hurt,  it  is  not 
often  humanly  possible.  So  instead  of  ex- 
plaining that  he  couldn't  logically  demand 
so  much  nobility  without  having  paid  down 
something  of  that  coin  on  his  own  account, 
I  contented  myself  by  asking,  if  love  was  so 
absolutely  beyond  human  management  and 
221 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

direction  as  his  theory  postulated,  what  was 
poor  Valda  to  do?  He  had  an  answer  for 
me  and  it  was  entirely  characteristic. 

Said  he,  "She  must  learn  to  have  more 
control  over  herself." 

It  was  at  this  point  I  dropped  him,  as  we 
must  the  whole  theory  of  the  "free"  rela- 
tion, forever  and  irrevocably  behind  us. 

§ 

"And  isn't  there  then,"  Valda  took  up  the 
thought  again,  "freedom  attainable?" 

Not  in  the  sense  that  it  can  be  vested  in 
one  party  to  the  adventure.  The  whole 
moral  conflict  of  today  is  epitomised  as  the 
struggle  for  parity  of  rights  between  con- 
tracting parties;  parity  of  citizens  with 
governors,  of  employed  with  employers,  of 
women  with  men.  Unless  this  is  a  principle 
of  human  conduct,  applicable  to  all  varie- 
ties of  human  relations,  it  becomes  a  mere 
222 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

social  exigency,  not  worth  all  the  fighting 
that  is  being  done  over  it. 

True  freedom  is  not  compatible  with  any 
sort  of  behaviour  which  has  human  damage 
as  its  outcome.  Even  the  most  anarchistic 
imagination  denies  the  admissibility  of  love 
initiated  by  violence,  which  is  exactly  as 
logical  as  casting  away  by  the  sword.  Once 
having  made  up  your  mind  to  inflict  on  an- 
other life  an  injury  to  give  ease  and  satis- 
faction to  your  own,  it  is  probably  imma- 
terial whether  it  is  accomplished  by  one 
method  or  another.  If  you  destroy  me  I 
had  as  lief  you  had  done  it  for  money  pas- 
sion or  murder  passion  as  for  the  passion 
called  loving.  The  final  account  with  na- 
ture and  society  has  to  be  settled  on  the  basis 
of  the  damage,  and  not  on  the  excuse  you  can 
invent  for  it. 

The  answer  then  to  the  question  as  to 
what  constitutes  sex  freedom  is  that  there 
223 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

can  be  no  freedom  within  sex  relations  until 
we  have  achieved  a  degree  of  freedom  from 
them. 

So  long  as  love  is  so  important  to  us  that 
it  disorganises  all  our  social  relations,  it 
has  us  by  the  throat. 

The  idea  that  there  is  something  rather 
creditable  in  being  so  susceptible  that  you 
can't  help  yourself  is  a  temperamental  fal- 
lacy— it  is  just  exactly  as  creditable  as  be- 
ing so  mad  you  can't  help  yourself,  and 
there  is  no  practical  difference  between  the 
harm  done  by  inordinate  loving  and  that 
resulting  from  inordinate  envy. 

Loving  is  important,  important  in  de- 
grees and  directions  not  yet  fully  realised; 
but  a  distinguishing  species  mark  of  man  is 
that  he  is  a  social  animal.  We  are  male 
and  female  for  definite,  marked  periods  of 
life,  but  from  beginning  to  end  we  are 
members  of  society.  The  due  proportion 
224 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

of  loving  in  life  is  exceeded  whenever,  by 
its  importunities,  we  are  prevented  from 
sinking  the  personal  issue  in  the  general 
good. 

This  is  a  hard  doctrine  to  only  two  classes, 
those  at  the  bottom  of  life  in  whom  by  what- 
ever misfortune  of  inheritance  or  training 
the  physical  propensity  exceeds  the  power 
of  social  co-ordination,  and  those  along  the 
Upper  fringe  in  whom  an  eccentric  culture 
has  bred  a  hypersensitive  ego.  In  the  great 
middle  field  marriage  does  actually  serve 
the  main  purpose  of  living.  Society  is 
largely  held  together  by  the  number  of  per- 
sons in  whom  loving  has  been  partially 
brought  under  the  control  of  the  intelli- 
gence and  will. 

This  is  a  state  of  things  which  must  be 
taken  into  account;  the  everlasting  stum- 
bling block  to  the  opponents  of  marriage  by 
arrangement.  The  affections  of  good  wom- 
225 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

en,  and  less  freely  of  good  men,  are  actually 
susceptible  to  the  claims  of  worth  and  de- 
serving. Women  can  love  the  mate;  the 
father  of  the  young  becomes  an  object  of  so- 
licitous care.  No  "village  of  a  thousand 
souls"  but  can  show  you  several  instances  of 
the  power  of  women  to  gather  up  and  hold, 
like  a  strong,  steady  lamp,  all  the  offices  of 
loving  under  the  directions  not  of  sex  in- 
clination, but  of  something  which  to  them 
spells  a  higher  form  of  compulsion. 

This  is  the  way  freedom  comes:  to  be 
able  to  walk  with  love  but  not  be  driven  by 
it;  to  be  able  to  hold  sex  impulses  as  we  are 
learning  to  hold  impulses  of  trade,  subject 
to  considerations  of  fair  play  and  sensitive 
to  the  general  social  direction. 

§ 

This  demand  for  a  relation  by  which  the 
right  of  discontinuance  can  be  vested  in  the 
226 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

unloving  member,  rather  than  in  the  faith- 
ful as  the  present  usage  places  it,  is,  like  the 
modern  prevalence  of  divorce,  sympto- 
matic. It  appears  from  time  to  time  in 
those  periods  of  history  characterised  by 
vast  accumulations  of  wealth  on  one  hand 
and  practical  or  chattel  slavery  on  the 
other,  tending  to  raise  barriers  of  class 
which  operate  against  free  mating  selec- 
tion. Clumsy  and  inefficient  marriage 
modes,  induced  by  such  social  disequili- 
brium, produce  this  inevitable  reaction.  All 
great  revolutionary  periods  are  preceded  by 
laxity  of  sex  behaviours,  and  in  so  far  as  the 
revolt  tends  to  re-establish  human  values  are 
followed  by  a  return  to  more  austere  and 
simpler  methods. 

The  same  reflexes  are  noticeable  in  the 

decay  of  an  existing  religion  and  the  rise  of 

another.     Not  because  of  any  prohibition 

which   religion   imposes,   but,    as  will   be 

227 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

shown  later,  because  of  the  attempt  to  make 
love-life  fill  a  place  which  can  never  be 
legitimately  occupied  except  by  the  exer- 
cise of  the  personality  in  its  cosmic  rela- 
tions. 

The  claim,  in  so  far  as  an  ideal  supported 
by  so  small  a  minority  can  constitute  itself 
a  claim,  for  a  relation  from  which  one  party 
can  withdraw  without  respect  to  the  wishes 
of  the  other  is,  by  and  large,  an  evidence  of 
imperfect  sexualisation.  I  am  aware  that  a 
statement  controverting,  as  it  does,  a  popu- 
lar notion  that  all  such  demand  proceeds 
from  an  excessive  propensity,  requires  ex- 
plication. 

In  general,  the  postulate  of  the  free 
lover  is  a  confession  of  inability  to  main- 
tain the  love-life  of  the  individual  in  the 
absence  of  the  only  one  of  its  elements 
which  the  constitutional  "free"  lover  can 
appreciate,  I  mean  in  the  absence  or  sus- 
228 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

pension  of  sex  attraction.  For  the  argument 
on  which  the  apostle  of  such  freedom  rests 
his  case  is  that  sex  attraction  constitutes  the 
whole  of  loving  and  is  the  sole  criterion  of 
mating. 

If  this  could  be  established  on  the  evi- 
dence of  the  Soul  Maker,  there  would  be 
nothing  left  for  us  to  say.  But  an  examina- 
tion of  the  earliest  manifestations  of  the 
habit  of  living  together  shows  it  to  have 
been  able  to  maintain  itself  not  only  in 
spite  of  the  seasonal  fluctuations  of  sex  at- 
traction, but  in  long  suspensions  of  the  act 
by  which  the  continuity  of  the  race  is  es- 
tablished. In  the  awakening  states  of  con- 
sciousness, far  from  being  an  emotion  su- 
perior to  obligation,  the  chief  service  of 
love  to  life  appears  to  have  been  to  establish 
obligation.  The  prevalence  of  long  mating 
periods  in  the  higher  species  is  proof  posi- 
tive that,  in  some  way  not  perfectly  clear  to 
229 


LOVE   AND   THE   SOUL   MAKER 

us,  nature  was  served  by  the  association  of 
creatures  in  pairs,  independently  of  the  pro- 
creating crisis. 

Whatever  this  bond  is,  how  compound  of 
interest  and  association,  it  is,  in  the  making 
of  man,  the  object  of  quite  as  much  pains  as 
the  brief  period  of  secondary  sex  character- 
istics by  which  mating  is  initiated.  It  bids 
fair  even  among  the  brute  species,  if  any- 
thing survives  the  assaults  of  dissolution,  to 
prove  superior  to  death  itself.  Instances  of 
the  death  of  one  mate  on  the  taking  off  of 
the  other,  even  among  lower  animals,  are 
not  exceptional. 

Full  mating  capacity,  then,  involves  the 
ability  to  get  something  out  of  those  phases 
of  mate-love  not  directly  induced  by  what 
we  call  sex  attraction. 

The  attempt  to  centre  marriage  only  in 
its  active  and  obvious  states,  and  to  limit  it 
to  aspects  of  the  relation  admittedly  and  in- 
230 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

escapably  fluctuant,  amounts  to  a  confession 
of  shortage  in  the  other  offices  of  loving. 
Life  laughs  at  the  too  fastidious  faculty 
which  is  at  the  mercy  of  an  unbecoming  hat 
or  a  thick  ankle,  which  grows  hysterical  at 
the  idea  of  restraint,  and  is  unable  to  main- 
tain itself  in  any  but  "ideal"  conditions. 


But  supposing  that  those  conditions  de- 
nominated ideal  by  the  advocate  of  the  un- 
regulated relation  should  prove  in  harmony 
with  the  dimly  guessed  racial  purpose,  it 
would  even  more  defeat  his  object.  If  you 
will  talk  very  directly  with  almost  any  free 
lover,  you  will  find  that  what  he  really  ex- 
pects of  the  free  alliance  is  a  state  of  things 
in  which  you  are  to  be  noble  enough  to  let 
him  go,  should  his  happiness  demand  it, 
but  he  is  not  required  to  be  noble  enough  to 
231 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

stay,  should  your  welfare  be  in  question.  It 
is  expected  to  operate  only  on  the  one  side 
of  the  unloving — for  where  indeed  would 
be  the  freedom  in  a  relation  which  left  both 
parties  free  to  decide  what  they  would  do 
about  it?  The  only  freedom  which  you  re- 
tain, supposing  you  so  unfortunate  as  to 
have  given  yourself  whole-heartedly,  is  the 
freedom  to  give  him  up,  which  you  had  bet- 
ter do  gracefully  because  in  any  case  he 
means  to  leave  you.  It  is  necessary  to  state 
this  colloquially  in  order  to  bring  out  the 
absurdity,  the  utter  overthrow  of  the  theory 
of  the  "free"  relation. 

For  should  this  ability  to  surrender  with- 
'j,     fjr 

out  pain  have  been  attained  at  the  highest 

spiritual  plane,  it  is  impossible  that  it 
should  be  so  without  a  corresponding  ca- 
pacity for  self-denial.  To  have  reached  a 
point  where  passion  is  so  disassociated  with 
the  process  of  living  that  the  object  of  it 
232 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

can  be  given  away  without  sensible 
loss  is  to  confess  oneself  at  a  pitch  of 
being  able  to  dispense  with  a  change  of 
lovers. 

The  consistent  free  lover  must  hold  him- 
self ready  to  surrender  his  mate  on  demand, 
but  in  order  that  his  social  values  shall  suf- 
fer no  diminution  he  must  be  able  to  do  so 
without  sensible  bitterness  or  grief.  This 
means  that  love  must  have  entered  very 
lightly  into  his  life,  or  that  he  loves  on  so 
high  a  plane  that  he  cannot  consistently  of- 
fer his  personal  feelings  as  an  excuse  for 
his  own  violation  of  the  bond.  A  passion 
that  is  not  vital  enough  to  establish  a  claim 
to  consideration  on  the  one  count  can  have 
none  on  the  other. 

Power  over  the  faculty  of  loving  is  un- 
doubtedly to  some  degree  attainable,  but 
there  is  no  evidence  that  it  does  or  should 
work  only  in  the  direction  of  unloving.  The 
233 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

clear  definition  of  mate-love  and  its  distinc- 
tion from. all  the  subsidiary  issues  ordinarily 
tied  up  with  it,  will  operate  to  raise  the 
plane  upon  which  the  personal  problem  is 
worked  out,  but  it  cannot  alter  the  balance 
of  the  equation. 

Admitting  the  general  social  good  as  the 
larger  criterion  of  marriage,  we  can  find 
but  one  righteous  solution  of  the  particular 
unhappy  instance,  and  that  is  that  each  af- 
fair should  be  charged  with  its  own  conse- 
quences. And  such  consequences  of  what- 
ever degree  must  rest  equably  on  both 
parties;  loving  or  unloving,  control  cannot 
justly  lie  in  the  hands  of  one  member  to  the 
disparagement  of  the  other.  Where  free- 
dom is  desired,  they  must  come  free  to- 
gether, for  that  is  a  mere  travesty  of  liberty 
which  in  discharging  the  account  of  one 
member  leaves  the  other  bound  to  grief  and 
humiliation.  One  may  ask  for  freedom  and 
234 


Y 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL    MAKER 

one  bestow  it,  but  neither  may  demand  and 
neither  compel.  And  this  law  of  equity  in 
loving  must  hold  not  only  for  the  public, 
certificated  relation,  but  for  every  kind  of 
union  between  men  and  women  as  between 
men  and  men.  It  is  not  the  spirit  in  which 
the  adventure  is  undertaken,  nor  the  incen- 
tive to  it,  which  establishes  the  basis  of  its 
dissolution,  but  the  contingencies  in  which 
it  involves  us. 

This  is  the  new  morality  of  sex  which  has 
been  worked  out  for  us  in  a  thousand  de- 
partments of  life  which  have  no  apparent 
bearing  on  sex,  the  morality  of  social  conse- 
quence. A  man  is  not  free  to  deny  his  child 
on  the  ground  that  no  child  was  wished, 
nor  exempt  himself  from  the  broken  life  by 
explaining  that  no  breakage  was  intended. 
This  is  the  law  of  conduct  worked  out  for 
us  in  battle  where,  though  the  risk  is  death, 
it  cannot  be  wholly  assumed  by  the  widow 
235 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

and  orphan,  worked  out  in  trade  where  the 
maimed  limb  or  the  phossy  jaw  is  not  abso- 
lutely at  the  cost  of  the  loser,  worked  out  in 
labor  where  the  blame  of  unemployment 
cannot  be  entirely  imputed  to  the  unem- 
ployed— the  morality  of  the  shared  conse- 
quence. 

This  is  the  way  to  the  new  freedom  when 
freedom  is  desired,  neither  to  cheat  nor  to 
lie  nor  to  compel,  but  to  stand  superior  to 
the  passions  of  sex  as  we  are  learning  to 
stand  free  of  the  passions  of  trade  and  in- 
dustry, and  to  play  fair  alike  in  loving  and 
unloving. 

Women — many  large-waisted,  clear-see- 
ing women  such  as  men  think  least  about 
when  they  think  of  loving — know  this 
way  out;  men  must  learn  it.  Although 
they  do  not  know  it,  their  feet  are  in  the 
upleading  paths,  for  love  like  empire, 
no  more  veiled  and  apart,  must  walk 

236 


LOVE    AND    THE    SOUL    MAKER 

openly  in  the  streets  of  equality  and  fra- 
ternity. 


The  truth  is  that  under  whatever  form, 
and  with  whatever  high  assumptions,  every 
effort  to  dispense  with  the  social  restriction 
of  mating  practices  is  an  effort  against  na- 
ture, an  attempt  to  quash  the  element  of  re- 
sponsibility. At  one  time  or  another  in 
world  history,  every  conceivable  method 
has  been  tried  of  handling  the  inconsequent 
relation  in  an  effort  to  reduce  it  to  terms  of 
social  betterment.  The  Greeks  tried  it, 
spreading  their  loves  to  the  light  and  air 
on  a  hundred  altars ;  but  though  they  dedi- 
cated their  courtesans  to  the  gods,  even  the 
Greeks  learned  that  it  is  indispensable  to 
have  sons  by  chaste  women.  I  am  not  sure 
that  the  evidence  of  history  is  not  to  the 
effect  that  money  is  the  least  corroding  of 
237 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

the  commodities  with  which  we  attempt  to 
compound  with  the  Soul  Maker.  It  at 
least  leaves  us  in  the  position  of  acknowl- 
edging the  logic  of  the  situation,  which  is 
more  than  can  be  said  for  the  proposal  of 
the  radicals  to  put  the  care  and  mainte- 
nance of  children  entirely  on  the  state,  thus, 
by  spreading  responsibility  thin,  causing  it 
to  disappear  altogether.  What  might  come 
to  the  children  from  such  an  arrangement  is 
a  question  that  can  be  answered  only  after 
considerable  experimentation;  what  would 
happen  to  marriage  would  be  our  final 
abandonment  of  it  as  a  private  and  personal 
affair. 

The  moment  that  any  pair  completely  re- 
signs the  issue  of  its  mating  to  the  state,  it 
resigns  also  the  right  freely  to  mate  and 
freely  to  bear.  Between  the  two  tyrannies 
of  private  indulgence  and  public  restraint, 
marriage  offers  itself,  a  fair  ground  within 
238 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

which  the  social  right,  though  it  may  never 
be  wholly  intrusive,  may  yet  never  be  com- 
pletely excluded.  It  maintains  itself  as  an 
institution  by  reason  of  its  adjustability  to 
the  eternal,  unavoidable  sequence  of  love 
and  obligation. 


IT  was  after  this  session  under  the  full- 
plumaged  trees  that  we  ceased  to  talk 
of  the  personal  aspects  of  Valda's 
case.  It  had  passed  the  point  where  speak- 
ing brings  relief.  The  only  unbearable  af- 
front is  the  inexplicable ;  the  comfort  of  con- 
fession is  the  aid  it  affords  to  the  understand- 
ing of  disaster.  We  had  talked  her  anguish 
down  to  that  dull,  unappeasable  pain  which 
makes  the  spirit  gaunt,  but  in  its  fall  we  had 
weighed  and  measured  it;  it  had  taken  its 
place  as  an  appreciable  quantity  in  the 
slowly  righting  scale  of  human  equity.  Be- 
cause we  had  measured  it. 

This  is  the  woman's  discovery  of  the  cen- 
tury, that  woman's  grievance  and  her  right 
240 


LOVE   AND   THE   SOUL   MAKER 

take  proportion,  not  from  man's  neglect  of 
them,  but  from  the  degree  of  their  consid- 
eration in  the  minds  of  other  women. 

From  this  time  forth  we  talked  of  the  fu- 
ture and  what  was  to  come  out  of  it  by  the 
rationalisation  of  sex  relations. 

"Too  much  of  a  readjustment  to  expect 
it  to  come  soon  or  suddenly,"  Valda  was 
afraid. 

On  the  contrary.  What  we  are  in  need  of 
most  is  to  realise  how  close  at  hand  the  ma- 
terial for  successful  mating  is.  We  are  a 
phrase-ridden  people.  We  are  remanded 
by  words  into  attitudes  that  have  long 
ceased  to  have  any  relation  to  our  activities. 
Many  of  our  marriage  modes  are  as  empty 
of  meaning  as  the  before-mentioned  papal 
hat.  If  any  churchman  in  the  world  under- 
took to  make  his  congregation  think  of  what 
that  first  stood  for,  the  police  would  arrest 
him.  If  any  churchman  attempted  to  in- 
241 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

duce  the  women  of  his  congregation  to  stay 
"in  the  home"  because  of  the  primary  rea- 
son which  made  it  a  proper  place  for  her,  he 
would  be  swamped  in  public  indignation, 
he  would  have  proven  the  absolute  inutility 
of  the  institution  for  which  he  stands. 

Women  stayed  at  home  primarily  be- 
cause, encumbered  as  they  were  with  their 
young,  it  was  the  only  place  where  they 
were  safe  from  beasts,  and  they  kept  on 
staying  because  later  when  man  advanced  a 
little  from  his  bruteness,  it  was  the  only 
place  in  which  they  were  safe  from  men. 
This  necessity  of  safeguarding  women  from 
predatory  males  made  of  the  home  a  fortress 
and  a  prison.  But  now  any  young  pair  with 
a  few  hundred  dollars  can  make  themselves 
as  safe  as  in  a  feudal  castle,  and  not  only  has 
the  actual  residence  of  women  ceased  to  be 
a  subject  of  attack,  but  the  individual  fe- 
male is,  except  by  a  small  class  and  under 
242 


LOVE  AND  THE  SOUL  MAKER 

particular  circumstances,  no  longer  open  to 
the  possibility  of  violation. 

It  is  this  loss  of  the  element  of  fear  out 
of  our  social  life  which  constitutes  the  most 
tremendous  modifying  influence  in  mar- 
riage modes.  The  number  of  places  where, 
and  the  circumstances  under  which,  women 
and  children  are  safe  increases  daily.  In 
general  it  may  be  said  that  it  is  eminently 
proper  for  women  to  go  anywhere  their 
young  go,  and  that  the  safety  and  well  being 
of  the  young  are  proportionate  to  the  extent 
that  the  environment  is  mixed  with  woman 
thought. 

What  is  important  is  to  realise  that  this 
permeation  of  all  the  departments  of  living 
with  the  home  element,  that  is  to  say  the  ele- 
ment of  safety,  is  here  and  now. 

In  America  the  home,  as  a  fenced-off, 
fortified,  inviolable  quarter,  is  practically 
non-existent.  Instead  of  being  a  place  within 
243 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

which  the  activities  of  life  are  carried  on  in 
spite  of  society,  it  has  become  again  the  nest, 
the  lair,  the  place  of  temporary  withdrawal 
from  the  activities  which  life  demands  of 
us.  The  moment  we  cease  talking  about  it 
in  capital  letters  we  see  that  this  is  so. 

The  extent  to  which  the  average  citizen 
concerns  himself  about  the  inviolableness 
of  the  particular  set  of  rooms  which  he  oc- 
cupies is  epitomised  in  a  burglar  alarm  and 
a  second  bolt  on  the  front  door.  He  is  vastly 
more  interested  in  making  the  street  along 
which  his  children  pass  to  school  danger- 
proof.  It  isn't  infringements  of  the  rights 
of  private  domicile  which  agitate  the  work- 
ing classes,  they  fought  all  that  out  some 
centuries  ago.  What  they  are  really  after 
is  to  have  the  factory  and  the  shop  made 
safe  and  unassailable.  For  if  the  home  is  no 
longer  the  centre  of  attack,  neither  is  it,  ex- 
cept on  the  farm,  the  centre  of  industry.  It 
244 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

is  about  two  hundred  years  since  it  has  been, 
for  anybody  except  young  children,  the 
centre  of  education. 

In  view  of  all  this  it  is  time  to  stop  senti- 
mentalising about  the  home  and  fairly  rec- 
ognise the  fact  that  the  conduct  of  married 
life  today  is  more  largely  conditioned  by 
affairs  outside  the  house  than  within  it. 
Much  of  the  modern  friction  of  marriage  is 
due  to  individual  inability  to  realise  this  as 
a  veridical  condition.  The  ideal  of  the 
home  as  a  high  wall  behind  which  the  con- 
duct of  life  should  go  on  according  to  a 
set  pattern,  has  crumbled  more  rapidly  than 
the  family  relation  has  adjusted  itself  to  the 
determining  nature  of  the  social  claim  on 
its  individual  members.  And  every  depart- 
ment of  family  life  has  yielded  to  this  read- 
justment more  readily  than  that  set  of  ac- 
tivities included  under  "domestic  service." 
Whether  performed  by  the  wife  or  by  sal- 
245, 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

aried  "help,"  these  reveal  a  lack  of  organi- 
sation so  demoralising  that  it  has  led  to  the 
home  becoming  not  the  safest,  but  in  cases 
where  it  is  not  her  own  home,  the  least  safe 
place  for  a  woman.  It  is  impossible  to  ig- 
nore the  reports  of  morals  courts  and  vice 
commissions  on  this  point,  namely,  that  the 
one  occupation  which  furnishes  the  most 
recruits  to  institutionalised  vice  is  the  one 
which  offers  "a  good  home"  among  its  in- 
ducements. Exposure  to  the  temptation  of 
loose  living  is  one  of  "risks  of  the  trade"  of 
domestic  service.  If  this  be  true  it  can  only 
be  because  of  the  attempt  to  condition  the 
life  of  the  worker  by  her  relation  to  the  in- 
mates of  the  house  rather  than  by  her  value 
to  society. 

s 

The  moment  we  have  worked  out  in  hu- 
man conduct  the  logical  conclusion  of  the 
present  situation  we  are  face  to  face  with  the 
246 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

most  tremendous  factor  determining  the  fu- 
ture modes  of  marriage.  This  "servant 
question"  is  a  little  door  but  it  opens  on  a 
wide  prospect.  To  admit,  as  we  are  being 
forced  to  do,  that  to  prepare  food  for  you 
under  your  own  roof  is  in  no  wise  socially 
or  economically  to  be  differentiated  from 
preparing  food  for  you  in  a  factory,  is  to 
surrender  the  last  claim  to  differentiate  do- 
mesticity from  any  other  set  of  industrial 
conditions.  In  other  words,  the  mere  cir- 
cumstance of  living  domestically  can  have 
no  logical  effect  on  the  value  or  classifica- 
tion of  the  labour  involved. 

We  have  already  progressed  so  far  with 
this  idea  that  we  are  attempting  to  give  ex- 
pression to  it  in  laws  which  compel  the 
husband's  recognition  of  the  labours  of  the 
house-mother  in  the  same  terms  in  which 
the  labours  of  the  "hired  help"  are  valued, 
but  its  implication  is  much  wider  than  that. 
247 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

At  its  widest  it  is  a  recognition  of  the  as- 
tonishing truth  that  the  essential  relations 
of  men  and  women  to  society  are  not  altered 
by  their  entering  into  sex  relations  with  one 
another.  Whatever  was  owed  before  mar- 
riage, of  gift,  of  self-development,  is  still 
collectible  and  in  the  same  coin.  It  admits 
no  theory  of  substitutes.  If  children  are 
your  best,  your  supreme  contribution,  let  us 
have  them ;  in  any  case,  children  or  no  chil- 
dren, let  us  have  the  best  of  you. 

All  this  is  even  more  revolutionary  than 
it  sounds.  For  if  men  and  women  are  in 
no  wise  differently  related  to  society  because 
they  are  married — men  never  were  held  to 
be  so — what  becomes  of  all  the  elaborate 
behaviours  we  have  built  up  in  anticipation 
of  their  becoming  so?  Up  to  this  time  all 
the  education  of  women,  all  their  premari- 
tal behaviour,  has  been  conditioned  by  this 
assumption.  All  our  fine  distinctions  as  to 
248 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

what  was  masculine  and  what  was  feminine 
were  based  not  on  observation  of  social  or 
biological  processes,  but  on  the  idea  of  the 
married  woman's  changed  relation  to  so- 
ciety. By  the  condition  of  being  lawfully 
married  to  a  man  she  became  morganati- 
cally  connected  with  the  world  of  thought 
and  industry.  In  order  that  she  might  wit- 
ness suitably  to  both  relations  she  was 
trained  from  childhood  in  the  attitudes 
proper  to  them. 

But  with  the  abolition  of  this  left-handed 
economic  and  social  relation,  we  have  done 
away  not  only  with  the  incentive  for  such 
posturing,  but  with  its  practice.  The  ways 
of  the  time  are  strewn  with  the  sawdust  of 
our  inflated  "wholly  masculine"  and  "essen- 
tially feminine"  stuffing. 

In  the  beginning  it  is  probable  that  the 
balance  of  preponderate  traits  between  male 
and  female  was  more  simply  and  evenly 
249 


LOVE  AND  THE  SOUL  MAKER 

kept  by  nature.  The  law  of  inheritance 
which  weaves  across  from  father  to  daugh- 
ter and  mother  to  son  has  made  for  a  gen- 
erous transfusion  of  traits.  But  very  early 
a  preponderance  was  artificially  fixed  by  the 
determination  to  regard  marriage  as  a 
state  of  absolute  economic  limitation. 
Women,  for  no  reason  except  that  they  were 
married,  were  thought  of  as  having  stated 
duties  and  functions  ;  any  capacity  in  excess 
of  the  requirement  was  suppressed,  wasted, 
and  thrown  away.  Any  trait  deemed  desir- 
able for  the  limited  purpose  of  marriage 
was  encouraged,  or  if  lacking,  was  simu- 
lated. None  the  less  certainly  were  men 
coerced  and  cajoled  into  the  stereotyped 

male  attitudes.    The  result  is  that  we  have 

"~>K""      \  /  - 

very  few  women  who  know  what  a  man 

/  _  -  -- 

really  is,  and  fewer  men  who  have  any  idea 
what  a  woman  ought  to  be.  All  our  inter- 
course is  rasped  by  the  exasperations  of  such 

2J° 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

mutual  misunderstandings.  Choice  of  a 
mate  is  made  not  on  actual  correspondence 
of  traits  but  on  apparent  fitness  for  an  as- 
sumed state.  Marriages  fail,  not  because 
they  fall  short  of  any  purpose  of  nature,  but 
because  either  party  fails  to  conform  to  the 
predetermined  pattern. 

In  this  mutual  crowding  of  the  sexes  into 
utterly  untenable  attitudes,  women  have 
suffered  most.  It  is  natural  that  from  wom- 
en as  a  class  should  come  the  most  spirited 
rebellion.  It  is  purely  incidental  that  the 
struggle  has  shaped  about  the  contest  for 
political  equality.  Under  all  forms,  the 
right  that  women  are  fighting  for  is  the 
right  to  be  themselves. 

/  '  c*"iL- 

r#f/^> 

It  is  immaterial  now  what  the  essentially 
feminine  may  prove  to  be — supposing  that 
251 

t  /-' 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

there  is  a  group  of  tendencies  and  capacities 
which  occur  widely  and  persistently  enough 
in  the  female  of  the  species  to  constitute  a 
sex  distinction. 

The  important  item  is  that  nothing  should 
be  assumed  to  be  characteristically  feminine 
merely  because  of  its  agreement  with  an  as- 
sumed condition.  Marriage  is  one  of  the 
activities  of  women  and  not  a  set  mould  into 
which  womanhood  should  be  poured. 
Whenever  the  fashions  in  which  marriage 
is  carried  on  become  so  straitened  that  they 
do  not  admit  the  whole  of  feminine  capac- 
ity, they  must  be  relegated  to  the  scrap 
heap  of  all  other  outworn  usages.  But  mar- 
riage cannot  widen  to  admit  woman  with  all 
her  accretions  of  capacity  without  admitting 
a  great  deal  more ;  it  must  be  wide  enough 
to  accommodate  the  whole  nature  of  man. 

It  is  probable  that  the  conventional  atti- 
tudes of  maleness  which  have  been  assumed 
252 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

largely  as  a  means  of  forcing  a  conventional 
expression  of  femininity  on  women,  are  no 
more  truly  masculine  than  timidity  and  ca- 
jolery are  the  true  mark  of  womanliness.  In 
admitting  the  social  waste  involved  in  the 
economic  parasitism  of  women,  we  open 
the  way  to  the  suspicion  of  social  loss  in 
forcing  on  every  man  irrespective  of  his 
native  capacity,  the  role  of  provider.  Let 
women  go  on  long  enough  in  the  way  they 
are  pointed,  and  the  direct  issue  of  their 
political  right  will  be  the  recognition  of  the 
personal  rights  of  man. 

§ 

It  is  natural  that  we  should  first  here  in 
America  arrive  at  the  greatest  discovery  of 
the  age,  the  mutual  discovery  by  the  sexes 
of  reality  in  each  by  the  other.  It  was  here 
in  the  exigencies  of  pioneering  that  the 
posing  and  posturing  of  the  sexes  which 
253 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

made  the  social  mould  of  the  last  cen- 
tury in  Europe,  received  their  first  sen- 
sible check.  The  enormous  human  activi- 
ties upon  which  we  are  embarked,  new 
ground  to  break,  new  cities  to  build,  have 
to  a  degree  removed  us  from  the  obsessions 
of  the  past.  Women  have  been  returned  to 
the  community  of  labour  at  something  like 
their  original  and  factual  value.  Absorbed 
in  the  struggle  with  virgin  wood  and  un- 
broken prairie,  we  have  been  obliged  to  take 
our  eye  off  the  processes  of  civilisation  for 
intervals  in  which,  we  have  amazingly  dis- 
covered, the  vital  functions  of  civilisation 
were  capable  of  sustaining  themselves 
whether  we  kept  an  eye  on  them  or  not. 

Marriage  has  been  going  on  among  us  as 
an  ardent  and  productive  activity,  but  by 
no  means  the  only  activity  of  our  women, 
and  the  heavens  have  not  fallen.  There  is 
no  force  operative  in  modern  life  so  potent 
254 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

to  affect  the  fashions  in  which  men  and' 
women  live  together  as  this  shuttling  to  and 
fro  of  the  thread  of  labour.  It  is  the  one 
thing  which  restores  to  us  the  advantage 
which  our  love-life  might  reasonably  claim 
from  sex  attraction. 

Sex  attraction  is  the  natural  advertise- 
ment of  efficiency  in  certain  of  the  offices  of 
loving.  It  is  evidence  of  the  ability  to  pro- 
duce in  another  those  high,  electrified  states 
of  being  under  which  it  is  desirable  that 
mating  take  place. 

The  impossibility  of  reconciling  this  re- 
ciprocal force  with  the  conventional  re- 
quirements of  marriage  has  led  to  its  neglect 
as  a  mating  factor,  has  brought  it  in  some 
quarters  into  absolute  disrepute.  For  the 
one  thing  which  experience  confirms  to  us 
is  that  sex  attraction  is  not  the  advertisement 
of  anything  else. 

In  very  simple  social  states,  reinforced  by 
255 


LOVE   AND   THE   SOUL   MAKER 

habit  and  self-interest,  such  mutual  attrac- 
tion may  answer  for  all  the  social  necessi- 
ties of  marriage;  but  among  more  complex 
personalities  it  can  only  be  admitted  as  an 
indicator  of  those  types  among  whom  it  is 
desirable  to  choose  a  mate.  Out  of  all  the 
individuals  capable  of  setting  up  for  us  this 
primary  appeal  many  will  be  found  want- 
ing in  other  and  equally  indispensable 
qualities.  What  one  needs  to  marry  is  not 
a  stock  model  of  the  opposite  sex,  but  the 
other  eye  and  hand  and  heart  of  oneself. 
For  when  sex  attraction  has  done  its  ut- 
most for  us,  it  is  still  left  upon  our  hands  to 
produce  those  correspondences  of  aim  and 
ideal  which  render  tolerable  the  obligations 
entailed  by  any  surrender  to  sex.  This  is  a 
task  for  all  that  we  have  of  fortitude  and 
skill.  We  unnecessarily  and  stupidly  en- 
cumber ourselves  when  we  add  to  it  the  ne- 
cessity for  matching  all  our  human  apti- 
256 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

tudes  not  to  the  aptitudes  of  the  mate,  but 
to  a  set  pattern. 

Marrying  for  sexual  efficiency,  that  is, 
for  the  sake  of  the  highest  values  which  are 
within  the  capacity  of  loving  to  produce, 
rather  than  for  social  conformity,  is  only 
compatible  with  absolute  freedom  in  the 
choice  of  labour.  Of  what  moment  is  it,  in 
the  hours  when  we  are  not  loving,  in  what 
capacity  we  are  returned  to  the  general  use? 
Is  it  too  much  to  expect  that  the  hours  of 
loving  will  be  enhanced  when  each  resorts 
to  them  from  the  work  chosen  by  his  soul 
rather  than  from  a  conventional  employ- 
ment? 

§ 

Contrary  to  general  apprehension,  it  is 
probable  that  the  recognition  of  human  ef- 
ficiency as  a  thing  apart  from  efficiency  in 
sex  will  react  favourably  on  the  modal  de- 
257 


velopment  of  the  family.  It  might  lead 
even  to  a  return  of  something  like  the  an- 
cient family  group  with  its  many  minor 
individuals  concentrated  about  one  domi- 
nant personality,  since  nothing  has  so  tended 
to  disrupt  this  natural  arrangement  as  the 
attempt  to  fix  the  headship  of  the  group  not 
in  competency  but  in  an  artificially  selected 
male,  say  the  first-born  of  the  first-born. 
All  the  bolstering  of  entail  and  primogeni- 
ture has  not  sufficed  to  make  patriarchs  of 
men  whose  only  qualification  has  been  that 
of  being  pater.  No  more  has  the  conven- 
tion of  financial  supremacy  made  the  suc- 
cessful head  of  a  family  of  one  entirely 
devoid  of  financial  ability.  Homes  have 
been  broken  up  and  children  have  come  to 
public  charity  because  of  our  persistence  in 
this  ancient  fetichistic  notion  that  the  ability 
to  make  a  business  produce  more  than  is  put 
into  it  is  an  exclusively  male  characteristic. 
258 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

On  the  other  hand,  hundreds  of  families  are 
going  on  successfully  under  the  manage- 
ment of  the  mother  on  whom  is  placed  the 
added  burden  of  pretending  quite  otherwise. 
Not  until  we  have  fully  realised  that  the  es- 
sentials of  marriage  are  at  all  times  superior 
to  the  fashions  by  which  it  is  expressed,  will 
we  be  rid  of  the  absurdity  of  attempting 
mechanically  to  co-ordinate  it  with  particu- 
lar ways  of  making  a  living.  The  only 
terms  we  have  a  right  to  make  with  mar- 
riage are  that  it  shall  stop  short  of  unfitting 
us  for  the  imperative  obligations  of  loving 
and  serving. 

i 

"But  how?"  Valda  insisted.  She  had  all 
a  woman's  passion  for  explicitness. 

Well — if  we  accept  for  a  criterion 
the  necessity  of  marriage  to  reinforce  our 
human  function  and  not  to  subvert  it,  we 
259 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

have  a  right  to  demand  that  those  who  have 
our  youth  and  education  in  charge  will  see 
that  we  do  not  come  to  marriage  uninformed 
and  unregarded.  Education  for  marriage 
should  at  least  rank  with  any  vocational 
training,  and  the  opportunity  for  free  selec- 
tion become  as  much  a  part  of  our  social 
opportunity  as  the  right  of  entry  into  any 
trade  or  profession.  These  are  the  things 
that  should  be  as  common  as  arithmetic. 
Individually  we  have  a  right  to  be  guaran- 
teed against  the  contaminations  of  disease 
and  insured  in  the  possibility  of  relief 
should  the  particular  marriage,  in  spite  of 
all  our  precautions,  work  out  to  the  lowering 
of  our  social  values.  It  is  impossible  that 
such  insurance  should  not  include  the  right 
to  be  maintained  in  a  marriage  as  well  as  to 
be  released  from  it,  in  the  face  of  circum- 
stances tending  to  subvert  the  social  service 
of  marriage  in  general. 
260 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

Beyond  this  it  is  difficult  to  say  to  what 
point  we  are  justified  in  social  compulsion. 
We  have  already  fixed  by  implication  the 
supremacy  of  love-life  in  women  as  against 
its  importance  to  men,  but  the  working  out 
of  this  idea  will  be  more  by  usage  than  by 
legislation.  It  is  probable  that,  before  we 
have  made  the  valuation  of  home  service 
in  terms  of  classified  labour  a  matter  of  com- 
mon practice,  the  law  will  have  to  be  in- 
voked. This  is  a  problem  so  mixed  with 
the  passion  for  property  that  something 
more  is  required  than  the  consensus  of  opin- 
ion to  put  it  in  operation. 

Two  opposite  influences  are  at  work  tend- 
ing to  modify  the  nature  and  extent  of  so- 
cial interference  with  personal  relations. 
One  is  the  demand  of  the  radicals  for 
greater  personal  freedom,  and  the  other  is 
the  steadily  accumulating  experience  of  the 
Court  of  Domestic  Relations,  which  goes 
261 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

to  show  that  people  require  help  in  their 
matings  as  much  as  in  any  other  department 
of  life,  and  need  often  to  have  it  applied 
with  authority.  So  far  the  case  of  the  radi- 
cals is  all  to  win.  The  more  we  examine 
into  the  examples  of  free  alliance  which  are 
offered  us,  the  more  they  fail  to  exhibit 
either  the  indispensable  social  utility  or  any- 
thing which  can  be  identified  as  the  Soul 
Maker's  mark.  Happily  for  the  issue,  the 
consideration  of  marriage  modes  and  moral- 
ities has  passed  the  point  where  it  is  ame- 
nable to  mere  opinion.  It  is  yielding,  as  far 
as  things  human  may,  to  exactitude.  No 
longer  is  it  worth  our  while  to  hear  the 
bishop  on  the  divorce  problem  unless  he  can 
at  the  same  time  give  evidence  of  more  than 
his  bishopness  in  support  of  his  claim; 
knowledge  of  anthropology,  of  biology,  of 
the  history  of  mate-love,  and  the  reports  of 
the  bureau  of  statistics.  In  every  case,  the- 
262 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

ories  of  love  and  marriage  must  yield  to  the 
growing  certainties  of  practice. 


§ 


"And  the  conclusion "  Valda  at  last 

ventured. 

"There  isn't  any.  Humanly,  to  conclude 
things  is  to  drop  them  behind  us.  We  of  the 
dominant  race  have  dropped  polygamy,  we 
are  in  a  way  to  drop  prostitution  as  soon  as 
the  conviction  of  its  racial  inutility  becomes 
a  part  of  our  social  consciousness.  All  the 
other  things  are  problems  of  today  or  tomor- 
row, or  at  most  the  week  after. 

"We  are  unfortunate  in  that  the  most  of 
the  writing  that  is  done  about  it  is  in  the 
hands  of  the  futurists,  who,  with  the  special 
case  they  make,  are  obliged  to  pitch  the 
mark  ahead  a  thousand  years  or  so,  and 
undertake  to  skip  us  into  it.  Love  is  Now. 
263 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

It  is  a  force  as  steadily  operative  in  human 
life,  as  susceptible  to  knowledge  as  any  other 
of  the  great  natural  forces." 

"But  wouldn't  that  somehow  make  it  less 
interesting,  knowing  about  it  beforehand?" 

"Just  to  the  degree  that  electricity  has  be- 
come less  interesting  since  it  has  ceased  to 
be  a  parlour  trick.  Love  is  for  doing  things, 
not  merely  for  wonderment.  It  is  time  now 
to  learn  what  things,  and  to  leave  off  play- 
ing with  it  as  children  play  with  fear,  pre- 
tending that  it  lives  in  the  coal-hole  of  our 
physical  natures,  from  whence  it  may  pres- 
ently appear  to  devour  us.  What  really  is 
in  the  coal-hole  is  the  fuel  of  the  flame  that 
warms  the  world." 


"That  is  all  very  well,"  said  Valda  Mc- 
Nath,  "but  what  are  we  to  do  when  the  fire 
burns  and  nobody  is  warmed  by  it?" 
264 


XI 


WE  have  to  return  from  time  to 
time  to  realisations  of  passion 
as  a  form  of  energy.  It  is  set 
up  within  us  and  our  brother  the  beast  at 
the  appointed  time,  without  leave  or  knowl- 
edge. The  procreant  urge  of  the  wild  what 
time  the  sun  climbs  up  the  zodiac  is  not 
understood;  it  is  probably  not  remembered; 
it  is  obeyed.  It  wakes,  irrespective  of  the 
presence  of  the  mate,  and  waking  sets  each 
ranging  far  afield  to  find  the  other.  This 
is  a  fact,  the  whole  bearing  of  which  must 
be  clearly  grasped.  The  beasts  which  mate 
anew  with  each  season,  before  the  oncoming 
of  their  time  are  running  singly  or  in  the 
flock,  the  young  males  usually  by  them- 
selves, the  females  with  the  brood  mother, 
265 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

and  they  set  out  to  find  one  another.  They 
go  seeking  and  calling.  They  make  a  call 
they  have  not  made  before,  and  they  answer 
to  a  cry  they  have  not  before  heard.  Traces 
of  this  linger  in  all  the  lore  of  early  man.  I 
know  a  little  theme  of  four  notes,  played 
upon  a  flute  of  cane  by  an  Indian  lying  out 
in  the  long  grass  at  twilight — it  is  known  as 
the  "love  call"  ...  by  and  by  the  maid 
comes  out  to  him. 

This  is  as  a  thin  line  of  light  under  a  door 
behind  which  full  understanding  waits. 
Subtlest  of  the  intimations  of  the  approach 
of  the  crises  of  sex  is  the  intimation  of  pres- 
ence. Man  or  beast,  the  lover  wakes  to  ex- 
pectancy. At  the  set  time  of  the  year  he 
walks  in  the  trails  and  feels  it  following  at 
his  back;  he  turns  and  it  is  not  behind  him. 

There  is  a  phase  of  adolescence  when  all 
the  world  is  in  love  without  in  the  least 
knowing  with  whom  it  is  in  love.  Romeo 
266 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

thought  it  Rosaline  until  Juliet  passed. 
For  the  man  as  well  as  for  the  race  there  is 
a  period  of  passionate  personification  of 
star  and  moon  and  glancing  water  to  satisfy 
this  active  suggestion  of  something  alive, 
intimate,  personal — out  there  beyond  the 
rosy  bush,  at  the  next  turn  of  the  trail,  with- 
in the  shadow  of  high,  wind-shaken  boughs. 
If  you  have  any  better  explanation  you  are 
welcome  to  it  so  long  as  you  keep  it  in  mind 
that  the  pairing  of  the  superior  species  is  not 
an  accident  of  propinquity,  but  a  business 
that  requires  effort  and  attention.  The  in- 
experienced and  unremembering  brute 
tracks  the  invisible  presence  until  it  brings 
him  to  the  mate.  Man,  going  further,  finds 
God. 

Let  us  agree  to  call  that  God  which,  un- 
attainable by  the  sense,  informs  us  from 
within  of  power  and  purpose.    It  is  a  con- 
venient term  and  has  the  advantage  of  being 
267 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

widely  received.  We  have  seen  how  love 
passes  in  man  from  the  identification  of  the 
source  of  well-being  with  the  person  of  the 
beloved,  through  the  dramatisation  of  her 
worth  in  surpassing  acts,  to  possession,  to 
the  establishment  of  permanence  by  with- 
drawal, and  to  the  certification  of  the  su- 
pernal quality  of  the  experience  in  the  of- 
fices of  religion.  This  is  the  normal  re- 
action of  mate-love  raceward.  But  there  is 
another  set  of  reactions  which  must  now  be 
taken  into  account. 

"I  worship  you,"  says  the  lad  to  his  first 
love.  Exactly.  There  is  no  difference  be- 
tween the  opening  movement  of  right  pas- 
sion and  the  fulness  of  the  heart  which 
makes  men  to  know  that  there  is  God,  no 
difference  between  the  initial  awe  and  mys- 
tery with  which  he  approaches  an  altar  and 
the  person  of  the  beloved.  He  can  kiss  the 
place  where  she  has  stood  as  reverently  and 
268 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

get  as  much  good  from  it  as  though  it  were 
the  holy  stone  of  Mecca. 

The  appreciations  of  sex  awaken  in  ado- 
lescence, and,  so  far  as  we  can  judge  in  early 
man,  about  the  same  time  as  the  sense  of 
communion  with  —  whatever  it  is  out  there 
beyond  the  end  of  knowing.  They  borrow 
phrases  one  from  the  other,  not  only  in  their 
initiative  but  for  their  highest,  consummat- 
ing moments.  St.  Catherine  could  find  no 
better  name  for  herself  than  Spouse  of 
Christ,  and  the  mystics  pass  in  all  their 
ecstatic  states  through  the  extended  scale  of 
passion.  It  is  one  of  the  evidences  of  the 
reality  of  both  mysticism  and  passion  that, 
in  whatever  lands  and  tongues,  these  states 
are  identical.  It  is  well  known  that  in  the 
lopping  off  of  one  or  the  other  of  these 
characteristic  personal  aptitudes  toward 
love  or  religion,  especially  in  the  impres- 
sionable states  of  adolescence,  the  other  is 
269 


- 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

intensified,  may  usurp  the  whole  field  of 
psychic  activity.  Your  great  religieuse 
might  always  have  been  a  great  lover.  Pure 
passion  of  the  heart  in  women  tends  nat- 
urally to  express  itself  in  the  forms  of 
spiritual  communion,  and  in  young  men  it 
prompts  toward  rectitude,  toward  courage 
and  altruism  with  emotional  impulses  iden- 
tical with  those  of  conversion. 

§ 

There  is  a  third  member  of  the  triad 
which  does  not  receive  due  attention,  fail- 
ing to  manifest  itself  frequently  in  the  de- 
termining quality.  I  refer  to  the  creative 
impulse.  This  is  likely  to  be  ignored  except 
where  it  occurs  in  a  distinguishing  degree, 
and  then  mistrusted  because  not  understood. 
At  its  most  universal  it  informs  the  nest- 
making  activities;  at  its  highest  it  gave  us 
"II  Purgatorio."  It  is  probably  present  in  all 
270 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

forms  of  extra-mating  activity — the  execra- 
ble verse  we  write  to  our  young  loves,  the 
twenty  unnecessary  nests  of  the  tule  wren. 

Although  science  has  not  yet  agreed  upon 
the  service  of  such  activities  to  sex  selection, 
it  has  conceded  their  continuity  with  the 
forms  we  know  as  art ;  and  artists  themselves 
have  witnessed  their  binding  up  with  all 
the  elements  of  devotion. 

In  the  hands  of  its  devotees  the  practice 
of  any  art  tends  to  become  a  religion,  forma- 
tive and  sustaining.  Its  revelations,  as  pro- 
found as  those  of  the  prophets,  have  the 
same  quality  of  providing  their  own  justifi- 
cation. Its  unformulated,  self-enforced  de- 
mands are  as  imperative  as  martyrdoms;  it 
has  the  same  tendency  as  religious  feeling  to 
present  itself  in  terms  of  personality,  to  get 
itself  addressed  as  Mistress,  Goddess,  the 
Nine  Muses,  the  Much  Desired — 

"Terrible  as  an  army  with  banners!" 
271 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

An  inherited  Anglo-Saxon  prejudice  in 
respect  to  the  interlocking  of  sex  and  art 
puts  us  out  of  touch  with  essential  processes. 
We  would  grant  to  the  artist  as  an  indul- 
gence what  we  are  wholly  unwilling  to 
allow  him  as  a  means  of  extending  his  ca- 
pacity. I  speak  however  of  definite,  related 
phenomena,  as  reducible  by  study  as  the 
evidences  of  will  and  attention — not  only 
psychic  states  but  pulse  beats,  temperatures, 
more  intimate  associative  processes  under- 
gone in  the  realisation  of  a  great  novel  or  a 
great  symphony. 

Not  only  have  we  the  evidence  of  history 
for  the  identification  of  the  creative  im- 
pulses of  mind  and  body,  but  there  are  great 
ones  living  who,  supposing  you  were  in  a 
position  to  put  them  to  the  question,  would 
tell  you  more  than  you  have  the  courage  or- 
dinarily to  know.  It  is  not,  however, 
necessary  to  enlarge  on  the  psychic  points 
272 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

of  likeness  between  great  love  and  great 
art,  nor  to  identify  the  trails  taken  by  the 
artist  on  the  way  to  achievement  with  the 
path  of  the  soul  seeking  the  Most  High. 
All  this  has  been  done  for  us  in  a  dozen 
books,  and  though  science  has  still  some 
points  to  settle  of  interdependence  and  pri- 
ority, at  least  that  is  an  exploded  theory 
which  makes  of  any  of  them  debased  or  per- 
verted forms  of  the  other.  We  are  free  to 
deal  with  them  all  as  concurrent  manifesta- 
tions of  augmented  vitality,  tending  to  raise 
the  plane  of  human  activity,  expressible  in 
terms  and  forms  of  one  another. 

§ 

There  is  another  phase  of  similarity  in 
those  activities  of  love  and  religion  and  cre- 
ative power  which  come  in  at  the  door  of 
adolescence,  not  to  be  overlooked.  They 
are  susceptible  of  being  played  upon  in  the 
273 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

same  degree  by  all  the  sense  perceptions 
and  by  rhythm  and  by  auto-suggestion. 

Mating  in  the  wild  is  accompanied,  per- 
haps accelerated,  by  beatings  of  the  earth, 
by  whirling  flights,  wing  dances.  In  man 
these  things  are  the  accompaniment  of 
awakening  religious  perceptions ;  we  snatch 
at  points  of  resemblance  in  Bacchic  fren- 
zies, in  those  white  figures  which  flee  for- 
ever around  the  red  ground  of  an  Etruscan 
vase.  For  the  drumming  of  the  partridge 
in  the  woods  we  have  the  drumming  of  the 
Soul  Maker  at  the  doors  of  consciousness. 
It  is  not  always  easy  to  determine  what  mu- 
sic is  the  food  of  love  and  what  of  religious 
ecstasy;  and  it  is  a  matter  of  temperament 
whether  the  consciousness  sensitised  by  line 
and  colour  leads  to  God  or  the  mate.  All 
old  myth-making  is  full  of  this  confusion  of 
states  and  identities.  In  the  earliest  stages 
the  god  became  familiar  as  the  lover,  later 
274 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

the  lover  appeared  divine,  rendered  unap- 
proachable by  a  touch  of  Christian  grace. 
It  is  a  matter  of  individual  gift  whether 
creative  power  grows  out  of  one  or  the 
other  of  them.  We  have  periods  of  great 
progress  in  the  arts  of  prayer  and  com- 
munion, periods  of  saint-making,  and  then 
a  sudden  florescence  of  art,  the  columns  of 
Milan,  the  Sistine  Chapel,  the  bright,  hun- 
dred-eyed, peacock  tail  of  Power. 

So  intimately  are  these  historic  incidents 
connected  that  it  needs  but  the  suggestion  to 
strike  them  into  order  in  your  mind;  but 
the  point  is  most  persistently  missed.  It  is 
acknowledged  across  the  field  of  human 
history,  but  on  our  realisation  of  it  in  the 
processes  of  individual  living  depends  the 
right  conduct  of  the  love-life  of  the  world. 

It  was  the  way  of  our  fathers  to  attempt 
to  regulate  sex  by  relegating  it  to  the  back 
275 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

room  of  living.  But  we  shall  get  very  little 
relief  from  the  new  fashion  of  setting  it  up 
at  the  front  window  so  long  as  we  continue 
to  regard  it  as  a  thing  to  be  considered  in 
itself  without  regard  to  its  derivations  and 
directions.  Sex  is  a  form  of  activity,  it  has 
for  its  objective,  reproduction  and  the  rais- 
ing of  the  human  plane.  It  is  commonly 
best  accomplished  by  marrying  and  having 
a  family.  In  the  states  of  adolescence,  how- 
ever, and  at  the  climacteric,  sexual  energy 
is  naturally  convertible  into  other  forms, 
passes  easily  and  without  volition  into  crea- 
tive processes  such  as  have  to  do  with  the 
higher  manifestations  of  consciousness. 

In  any  wounding  of  its  more  usual  func- 
tion, the  love-life  of  the  individual  tends  to 
retreat  into  interchangeable  phases  of  crea- 
tive and  religious  life,  is  capable  of  becom- 
ing fixed  in  them  past  the  likelihood  of  re- 
turn. Conversely,  morbid  states  of  religious 
276 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

emotionalism,  and  many  futile  and  discom- 
moding artistic  aspirations,  are  resolved  by 
a  suitable  marriage  and  the  normal  exercise 
of  loving.  Perfectly  obvious  conclusions  all 
of  these,  and  yet,  singularly,  seldom  ad- 
mitted to  discussions  of  sex  morality. 

The  difficulty  with  all  our  attempted 
solutions  is  that  we  are  attempting  to  deter- 
mine the  problem  of  sex  within  itself.  Like 
the  lady  of  the  zenana,  when  we  have  tried 
sitting  on  one  side  of  the  room  we  sit  a 
while  on  the  other.  We  shuttle  between 
Spartan  denial  and  the  unregulated  rela- 
tion; debate  wavers  over  the  ground  of 
guarded  experimentation — but  it  is  seldom 
distracted  from  the  personal  issue  to  the  two 
doors  on  either  side.  Attention  and  repro- 
bation are  centred  on  an  act.  We  recog- 
nise the  importance  of  the  premarital 
period  to  the  extent  of  admitting  youth 
to  knowledge,  but  it  is  knowledge  bounded 
277 


LOVE   AND   THE   SOUL   MAKER 

by  the  pathologist.  We  give  them  sex 
hygiene — of  a  sort.  The  mistake  lies  in^ 
supposing  that,  having  done  everything 
to  render  the  young  cautious,  we  have 
done  anything  to  raise  the  plane  of  sex 
morality. 

What  we  have  done  is  merely  to  change 
the  argument  but  not  the  fact  of  suppres- 
sion. We  afford  no  help  whatever  toward 
the  realisation  of  sex  as  an  active  principal. 
I  mean  that  we  still  offer  nothing  in  the 
direction  of  higher  standards  of  love  living 
except  the  denial  of  particular  acts  under 
the  extenuating  term  of  self-control.  But 
there  is  no  element  of  control  in  our  present 
method,  for  the  whole  idea  and  object 
of  control  is  direction.  The  very  use  of  the 
word  implies,  or  should  imply  to  any  one 
with  a  conscience  about  words,  something 
in  motion  or  about  to  move.  But  applied  to 
the  education  of  the  young  in  this  particular 
278 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

phase  it  means  stoppage,  complete  inhibi- 
tion. 

This  is  a  method  which  exposes  the  young 
to  two  dangers :  first,  the  danger  of  accumu- 
lated repression,  breaking  out  finally  in  ex- 
cesses beyond  all  bounds;  or  the  stoppage 
also  of  certain  correlated  impulses  of  ado- 
lescence important  to  preserve.  Thus  we 
come  to  marriage  handicapped  by  habits  of 
looseness  or  with  appreciations  dulled  by 
long,  unintelligent  restraints. 

The  situation  is  still  further  stultified  by 
the  sort  of  assistance  rendered  to  the  in- 
dividual struggling  for  such  misprised  "con- 
trol," which  ordinarily  takes  the  form  of 
suppressing  the  secondary  characteristics  of 
adolescence,  the  gaieties,  self-dramatisa- 
tions, swift  explosions  of  energy  common 
to  youth.  The  success  of  the  moralists  has 
been  too  frequently  the  evidence  of  anemia. 

And  all  this  while  nature  has  provided 
279 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

two  safe  and  productive  shifts  by  which  the 
developing  consciousness  is  enabled  to  re- 
sist the  importunities  of  the  mating  impulse. 
I  mean  by  the  transmutation  of  the  energies 
of  adolescence  into  religious  exercises  and 
creative  art.  The  only  aid  which  self-con- 
trol can  afford  is  in  making  possible  such  re- 
direction. 

Observe  that  there  is  a  difference  between 
religion  and  religious  exercises.  Except  in 
the  case  of  one  church  which  by  ritual  and 
symbol  and  the  constantly  recurring  exer- 
cise of  confession  and  communion  manages 
to  keep  alive  in  its  youth  some  active  spirit- 
uality, the  help  that  is  afforded  by  estab- 
lished religion  is  slight.  In  most  of  our 
educational  institutions  it  is  confined  to  a 
perfunctory  public  service  of  prayer  and 
song,  and  some  denominational  activities  of 
a  palely  altruistic  cast.  It  is  possible  to  find 
ministers  charged  with  the  religious  in- 
280 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

struction  of  the  young  who  do  not  know 
clearly  what  is  meant  by  a  "spiritual  exer- 
cise" and  would  be  wholly  incompetent  to 
guide  their  charges  to  those  high  states  of 
being  wherein  things  otherwise  unattainable 
come  to  pass.  I  have  talked  with  such  men 
and  I  have  also  talked  with  Indian  med- 
icine men  who,  when  they  go  to  prepare 
their  young  braves  for  the  ordeals  of  chas- 
tity and  endurance  incident  to  their  assump- 
tion of  tribal  responsibility,  are  far  better 
acquainted  with  the  psychic  path  by  which 
the  serviceable  state  of  mind  is  reached.  It 
is  part  of  the  immemorial  knowledge  of 
mankind  that  there  are  such  states ;  savages 
seemed  to  have  found  their  way  to  them  as 
deer  to  old  salt  licks,  by  an  instinct  of  self- 
preservation.  The  Christian  Fathers  found 
it  through  obedience  and  prayer;  the  indi- 
vidual artist  has  each  his  little  stair  by 
which  he  climbs  to  power. 
281 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

In  youth  the  way  lies  close  at  hand.  That 
is  why  youth  is  the  time  for  visions,  hero- 
isms, crusades,  for  the  impossible,  the  pat- 
ently absurd.  The  young  heart  fully  exer- 
cised in  these  has  little  time  for  ranging  in 
the  streets  of  offence.  Galahad  was  pure 
because  he  followed  the  Grail — he  followed 
it. 

Not  only  have  we  lost  the  use  of  religion 
in  our  educational  life,  but  we  have  never 
had  the  practical  use  of  artistry.  The  will 
to  create  begins  to  awake  with  the  p recrea- 
tive powers  of  the  body,  but  never  since 
book  learning  began  has  it  been  legitimately 
satisfied.  In  the  past  much  of  the  safety  of 
women  lay  in  the  readiness  with  which  they 
could  turn  to  the  making  of  fit  and  beautiful 
things,  and  sustain  their  newly  awakened 
creative  aptitudes  by  weaving  fair  linen  for 
the  nest,  but  modernly  even  this  is  denied 
them.  This  is  one  of  the  sources  of  that 
282 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

reaction  against  schooling  which  is  charac- 
teristic of  adolescence.  Young  things  turn 
from  the  accumulation  of  facts  to  the  mak- 
ing of  things,  in  the  shop,  at  the  spinning 
wheel  and  loom.  But  by  degrees  we  have 
bent  them,  we  have  widened  the  capacity 
to  assimilate  and  stunted  the  power  to  do. 
What  graduate  of  our  high  schools  can 
make  any  really  useful  or  beautiful  thing? 

We  surround  our  young  with  everything 
which  tends  to  arouse  and  stimulate  the  cor- 
related activities  of  sex,  we  wish  them  to 
know  the  best  music,  see  the  best  pictures, 
to  hear  the  most  "inspiring"  plays.  The 
nest-making  instinct  is  astir,  creative  im- 
pulse is  at  work  and  the  end  is  futility.  For 
all  their  "inspiration,"  they  lead  no  forlorn 
hopes,  serve  no  shrines,  create  nothing,  dare 
nothing. 

There  is  but  one  form  of  activity  left  for 
them;  they  can  still  have  "affairs."  The 
283 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

way  out  into  creative  work  and  into  the 
realisation  of  high  ethical  enthusiasms  is 
hard  for  the  young  to  find,  we  hedge  it  about 
with  too  many  careful  restrictions.  But  the 
way  the  body  points  is  near  at  hand.  All  the 
books  and  the  plays  and  the  operas  blaze 
that  trail  for  them. 


It  is  on  some  sort  of  deliberate  redirection 
of  the  energies  indissolubly  associated  with 
sex  that  the  regeneration  of  our  love-life 
must  largely  depend.  And  not  only  for  the 
young,  but  for  all  of  us. 

In  a  world  of  machine-made  things, 
where  religion  is  reduced  to  a  formula, 
lovers  turn  and  rend  one  another,  demand- 
ing what  it  was  never  meant  love  should 
pay.  We  seek  wholly  in  passion  an  expres- 
sion of  what  was  originally  intended  as  a 
prompting  toward  things  made;  we  attempt 
284 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

to  get  out  of  one  another  what  is  obtainable 
only  by  the  personality  in  the  exercise  of  its 
cosmic  relation.  And  we  know  no  better 
method,  when  one  love  fails  to  answer  all 
these  demands  upon  it,  than  to  deny  love 
altogether,  or  to  snatch  at  as  many  others  as 
possible.  It  is  probable  that  we  do  not 
make  enough  of  love  in  life,  of  its  relation 
to  all  our  activities  and  its  power  to  affect 
them,  but  it  is  certain  we  make  too  much  of 
loving. 

Complete  sexualisation  should  mean  the 
power  to  range  with  some  freedom  through 
all  the  correlated  and  interchangeable  ac- 
tivities of  the  mating  impulse,  recouping  in 
each  the  possibility  of  especial  disaster. 
Such  power  should  enable  us  to  await  with- 
out capitulation  the  coming  of  the  proper 
mate,  or  in  any  failure  of  the  adventure  it 
would  mitigate  against  the  use  of  violence 
in  unavoidable  partitions.  And  should  no 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

mate  be  forthcoming  it  would  enable  us  to 
return  to  society  something  like  our  full  sex 


potentiality  in  other  and  acceptable  terms. 
I  go  so  far,  indeed,  as  to  wonder  if,  aside 
from  its  relation  to  reproductivity,  the  per- 
ception of  Unrealised  Good — the  base  of  all 
religion — is  not  the  root  and  stock  of  sex, 
and  love  and  art  sprung  out  of  it,  a  red  rose 
and  a  white,  on  either  side. 

Now  and  then  some  soul  comes  up  among 
us,  a  tall  and  lovely  shoot  like  the  prophet 
of  Nazareth,  with  no  branching.  That  is 
why  I  am  inclined  to  name  the  unrealised 
good  as  the  middle  growth,  it  is  the  only 
one  which  unaided  of  the  others  produces 
for  us  a  symmetrical,  fruitful  tree.  Art 
must  still  borrow  of  love  and  religion,  and 
to  live  wholly  in  personal  love  is  to  incline 
toward  decay.  For  sex  is  an  active  princi- 
ple. It  must  work;  forward  into  the  field 
of  life  or  secretly  corroding.  The  best  lore- 
286 


LOVE   AND   THE    SOUL   MAKER 

life  is  not  necessarily  the  most  loving,  but 
the  one  which  has  the  best  use  of  love's  ac- 
tivities. 

Love  travels  toward  a  mark;  we  serve 
the  Soul  Maker  most  who  travel  with  it 
toward  its  unimagined  goal. 


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